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Wednesday, April 8, 2020

GOOD NEWS UPDATE: The Enemy Within

I didn't bother commenting when the story was leaked about Peter Navarro pretty much getting in Tony Fauci's face at a pandemic conference chaired by Vice President Pence. I guess the point of the story was that Navarro, being a Trump adviser, was bound to be a churlish know nothing and that Fauci was the voice of science and reason. The reality, of course, was that Fauci had documentably resisted taking effective action sooner than might have been done. Which could be forgotten in the circumstances if not for some of Fauci's antics since then.

Don Surber puts this into nice perspective, while quoting a NYT article that, from the excerpts, appears remarkably fair:

The New York Times reported, "A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the corona virus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death. 
"The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed China’s leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States." 
The story also said, "Mr. Navarro was at odds with medical experts like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who had argued that such travel bans only delay the eventual spread. 
"Mr. Navarro alluded to that debate on Saturday during a separate argument with Dr. Fauci in the Situation Room about whether the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating or preventing the virus, according to two people familiar with the events." 
So it was a political appointee -- not a health expert -- who got President Trump to restrict travel to Red China. Fauci opposed the restriction. Now Doctor Doom wants us to stay in quarantine for a year or more. And he casts shade on the cure. He is the enemy within.

UPDATE: Commenter titanbabe noted that the link above no longer works and that Surber appeared to have taken down the post that I quote from. That post was part of one of his generic "Highlights of the News" posts. The good news is that, far from backing down--which would have been very surprising--Surber has devoted an entire post to the Fauci - Navarro story: Not listening to experts saved lives. And it's just as pithy as you might expect. Surber begins by noting, as I did, the remarkably fair coverage of this story by the NYT:

The New York Times had an intriguing report that if true totally vindicates President Donald John Trump while implicating Dr. Anthony Fauci as the man who shrugged COVID-19 off as just the flu.

Here's how it ends:

Had President Trump listened only to experts, we would all be dead by now. 
It was a political supporter and appointee -- not a health expert -- who got President Trump to restrict travel to Red China. Fauci opposed the restriction. Now Doctor Doom wants us to stay in quarantine for a year or more. And he casts shade on the cure. 
I keep hearing from readers who believe he is the enemy within. Never discount the probability of incompetence. 
Navarro, 70, has no medical training. He has a PhD and was a professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Irvine as a professor of economics and public policy, and is now a professor emeritus. He also wrote, "The Coming China Wars," which likely drew Donald Trump's attention. Navarro's title is Director of Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, but obviously he is there because of his expertise on Red China. 
In his January 29 memo on COVID-19, Navarro wrote, "If the probability of a pandemic is greater than roughly 1%, a game-theoretic analysis of the corona virus indicates the clear dominant strategy is an immediate travel ban on China."
Two days later, the president restricted travel from Red China. 
And Navarro wrote in that memo, "Regardless of whether the corona virus proves to be a pandemic-level outbreak, there are certain costs associated with engaging in policies to contain and mitigate the spread of the disease. The most readily available option to contain the spread of the outbreak is to issue a travel ban to and from the source of the outbreak, namely, mainland China."

For anyone worried that Trump is being led around by Fauci, don't believe that. The fact that Fauci gave such glaringly bad advice militates strongly against that. Trump will be talking with clear thinkers like Navarro and Barr and others. They will help him make the call on ending the shutdown--not Fauci. Trump will of course accept advice from medical experts, but will certainly from experience how much weight to place on that advice.

19 comments:

  1. It's the Peter Principle - you rise to your highest level of incompetence - Fauci rose to his highest level and then gotten promoted. Navarro is still rising in his career.

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    1. Seeing as Fauci has been with NIH for almost as long as J. Edgar was with the FBI, it's likely that Fauci long ago made his peace with the D.S. (and thus w/ the ChiComs?).
      How does a guy last so long, w/o cozying up to the D.S.?

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  2. In the Nixon era it was "sinister forces."

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  3. The irony, they are many ways to treat this without any new drugs. One thing I read was that ventilators were not a big help. There is a gas out there that used with a ventilator can help. Nitric Oxide. It helps the body assorb oxygen better. I know because I was a Blue Baby and I was administered it at birth. Nitric Oxide is also the root compound of viagra.

    Rob S

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  4. >The story with Hydroxychloroquine

    All that hilariously misguided and counterproductive criticism the media piled on chloroquine (purely for political reasons) as a viable treatment will now go down as the biggest Fake News blunder to rule them all. The media actively engaged their activism to fight ‘bad orange man’ at the cost of thousands of lives. Shame on them.
    How does chloroquine work? Same way as it does for malaria. You see, malaria is this little parasite that enters the red blood cells and starts eating hemoglobin as its food source. The reason chloroquine works for malaria is the same reason it works for COVID-19 — while not fully understood, it is suspected to bind to DNA and interfere with the ability to work magic on hemoglobin. The same mechanism that stops malaria from getting its hands on hemoglobin and gobbling it up seems to do the same to COVID-19 (essentially little snippets of DNA in an envelope) from binding to it. On top of that, Hydroxychloroquine (an advanced descendant of regular old chloroquine) lowers the pH which can interfere with the replication of the virus. Again, while the full details are not known, the entire premise of this potentially ‘game changing’ treatment is to prevent hemoglobin from being interfered with, whether due to malaria or COVID-19.<

    in comments

    https://www.theburningplatform.com/2020/04/07/the-coronavirus-encounters-of-an-average-american-nobody/

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    1. Again, to repeat, this is not some brand new discovery out of the blue. Research into HCQ began soon after the 2003 SARS outbreak, and their were published studies between 2005 and 2014 reporting excellent results. When this pandemic came along, it was natural to look to HCQ.

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    2. Interesting how it proves the point made about how if PDT came up with -- or just suggested -- a cure for cancer, they'd still hate him. Only it goes further, to show that on top of that, they wouldn't even help publicize the cancer cure as a real option.

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  5. I'm certainly no medical expert qualified to argue with anyone. Is it likely that Fauci, a longtime govvie, has the typical aversion to risk? In answering my own question, the answer is probably yes.

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    1. No doubt. Most of these guys who rise to the top of a bureaucracy don't do it by taking risks.

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  6. Fauci was even noticed giving little signals of familiarity (or attaboys?) with anti-Trump reporters Jon Karl and Jim Acosta. Sounds like a small thing unless you know the whole picture re Fauci, which has become pretty clear. If he foolishly believes PDJT doesn’t know what he’s up to, he is sadly mistaken… There will come a time when COVID-19 is behind us. Then we’ll see about Dr. Fauci.

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/04/08/fauci-signaling-to-acosta-during-white-house-briefing/

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    1. PDJT doesn't miss anything. And I very much doubt that he's relying solely on Fauci. He knows.

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  7. Looks like Don Surber has pulled this article ? Somebody doesn't like Fauci being criticized ? I think Trump is aware of the little Napoleon's biases and is ignoring his advice.

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    1. Surprising and unusual. I still like it. I agree re Trump. I think he's being discriminating in evaluating recommendations.

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  8. I didn’t see the original, but if he didn’t post a link to NYT article, there’d be copyright problems. The article may have been behind a paywall or required registration of some kind. Surber does not link to those.

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    1. Have tried twice to post correct link to Surber article (the link in the posted article here is incorrect) No luck. One more time:

      https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2020/04/not-listening-to-experts-saved-lives.html

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  9. If one follows Pres DJT tweets, Meaning in History, Don Surber and the Babylon Bee, then he is up-to-date on what is REALLY going on.

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  10. Here is the link for the Surber article. According to him, it has been there all along.

    https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2020/04/not-listening-to-experts-saved-lives.html

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  11. The Streetwise Professor has a good article addressing one of the things that has bothered me since I saw how Italy was counting just about every death as Covid-19. https://streetwiseprofessor.com/bullshit-numbers/ We all know we can't believe China's numbers, but the Professor says we can't believe our own, either. We should be, he says, counting as Covid-19 deaths, only those which would not have occurred absent the Chinese virus. Instead, we count all those in which the virus was involved, and those where it might have been involved, and maybe others. It's BS numbers all the way down. I think it's a good read.

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  12. From Sailer today (quoting The Guardian), on virus spreads owing most, to long interaction in really close quarters (supporting case for reopening less-cramped places like restaurants):

    “One pattern we are seeing across the globe is that wherever there was *singing and dancing*, the virus spread more rapidly,” said Prof Hendrik Streeck, a virologist at the University of Bonn, whose team of researchers has spent the last week carrying out the first “Covid-19 case cluster study” in Heinsberg.

    “Most infections didn’t take place in *supermarkets or restaurants*,” Streeck said of his preliminary findings.
    In Heinsberg, his team of coronavirus detectives could find scant evidence*, of the virus being transmitted via the surfaces of *door handles, smart phones* or other objects....

    Instead, he said, transmission took place at “events where people spent a length of time in each others’ close company”....

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