Read the rest here. Zero mention by the legacy media, of course, because it doesn’t fit their anti-Trump narrative.

2. Over-regulation has serious consequences, as noted in this article about the CDC:

The U.S. testing process failed. The day that the CDC announced it had developed its testing protocol, January 21, was the date of the first documented American case of coronavirus. South Korea documented its first case the same day. But by March 17, the United States had administered only 125 tests per 1 million people; South Korea had administered more than 5,000 tests per 1 million over the same time span. By aggressive testing, South Korea was able to trace viral spread and contain it. Without it, the U.S. was left with little choice but the draconian measures that have shut down much of American life.

As has been widely reported, the CDC’s in-house testing design was flawed, thus compromising early testing results. Mistakes happen, but the impact of the test-design flaw was much greater than it should have been—owing to the U.S. bureaucracy’s tightly controlled process. Even had the CDC test worked perfectly, not nearly enough tests would have been available for wide-scale testing on the South Korean model.

The reasons: the American regulatory system, cumbersome even in emergency settings; and the specific choices made by regulators that proved to be tragic misjudgments. As Alec Stapp of the left-leaning Progressive Policy Institute has documented, after Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar declared a public-health emergency on January 31, private laboratories had to obtain an Emergency Use Authorization to conduct their own testing. On February 4, the FDA approved an authorization for the CDC—and only the CDC. This created a testing bottleneck, with all testing in the nation routed through the government agency. By February 28, the CDC had processed only 4,000 tests. The next day, the FDA finally invoked the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments to permit testing at some 5,000 highly specialized virology labs (among more than a quarter-million laboratories nationwide with some testing capability). The first Emergency Use Authorization granted to any entity other than the CDC was issued on March 12, to Roche. Throughout this period, the rollout of mass testing was limited by privacy rules in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA); they were not waived until March 15.

Read the rest here. And yet the Democrat-media complex blames President Trump.

3. President Trump is rising to the challenge of the Chinese plague, and Americans have noticed:

A new Gallup poll reveals that the majority of Americans, 60%, approve of the way the president is handling the crisis. This includes the majority of Independents, 6 out of 10, and a growing swath of Democrats, 27%.

In fact, Trump’s approval rating is so high right now that even CNN is acknowledging it. “President Donald Trump is as popular today as he has been since his first day in office,” CNN Editor in Chief Chris Cillizza wrote Wednesday. “What accounts for Trump’s rise? Simple: His response to the coronavirus crisis.”

Read the rest here. Thank God that Hillary Clinton isn’t in the Oval Office. Can you imagine that horror?

4. Could the pandemic not be as bad as predicted? Possibly.

A model predicting the progression of the novel coronavirus pandemic produced by researchers at Imperial College London set off alarms across the world and was a major factor in several governments’ decisions to lock things down. But a new model from Oxford University is challenging its accuracy, the Financial Times reports.

The Oxford research suggests the pandemic is in a later stage than previously thought and estimates the virus has already infected at least millions of people worldwide. In the United Kingdom, which the study focuses on, half the population would have already been infected. If accurate, that would mean transmission began around mid-January and the vast majority of cases presented mild or no symptoms.

Read the rest here. If so, some people have a lot for which to answer.

5. Joe Biden is pandering to the Left because he has to.

Perhaps the most significant item to come out of the March 15 Democratic presidential debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders was just how much the so-called moderate agreed with the radical.

Biden said he and Sanders agree that “health care should be a right.”

Whether Biden is at heart a Sanders socialist or is merely pandering to keep the Democratic coalition together is really of secondary importance to the fact that the socialist wing of the party is so big, strong, and vocal that Biden clearly believes he must appeal to it.

Contrary to the notion that the Sanders-Omar wing is popular but politically impotent, I suggest that indicators such as the radically leftist positions of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment charade, and the party’s unwillingness to censure Omar by name and her antisemitic rhetoric specifically, indicate that wing is strong. The party is merely following the leftward slide of its electorate, led by disproportionately influential white elites.

Read the rest here. The Bernie bros are the future of the Democrat Party – and death for our constitutional republic.

6. The ChiComs claim they have Dr. Death on the run; others are skeptical.

China’s announcement this month of nearly a week of no new infections in Wuhan, the hard-hit city where the coronavirus pandemic originated, was both hope-inspiring — and hard to believe.

Medical professionals said the draconian set of policies imposed by the Chinese government – including widespread testing, isolation of all infected people and anyone they came in contact with – are proven methods for limiting contagion. Other countries, South Korea and Taiwan, for example, have followed similar courses, and they have also reported steep declines in new infections, though neither says it has achieved no new local infections, as China claims.

“What we don’t know is the degree to which they’re being transparent and the degree to which they’re following up on existing infections,” Don Goldmann, a professor of immunology, infectious diseases, and epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a phone interview.

Read the rest here. The ChiComs lied about the virus from the very beginning. Why should we believe them now?

7. The #MeToo movement is all talk and no action, it would appear.

The woman who has come forward to accuse former Vice President Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her in the early 90s was denied legal assistance from a prominent #MeToo law fund.

The Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization set up within the National Women’s Law Center, which is itself a non-profit, initially seemed interested in taking Tara Reade’s case against Biden. But after discussions within the organization, Reade was declined help because Biden was a candidate for federal office, which could jeopardize the organization’s non-profit status.

Read the rest here. I thought the #MeToo crowd believed every woman?

8. Historian Victor Davis Hanson exposes the putrid performance of the legacy media during the Chinese plague:

Everyone knew before just how biased and unprofessional the media had become in its maniacal hatred of Donald Trump. But few appreciated how uneducated, arrogant, and clueless about simple calculations and logic was this generation of reporters that has emerged from politicized schools of journalism, which taught therapy rather than knowledge, much less a code of conduct.

The media daily blares out preliminary models and data, without even the most remedial context. They parrot the supposedly historic death rate of the virus, without any knowledge that the denominator of virus cases is as inaccurate and misleading as the numerator of deaths is mostly factual.

Then they seemed surprised that the death rate dips as tests and supposed cases spread, without any appreciation that known cases are likely not representative of the populace as a whole, but represent only those who were tested (80-90 percent negative), and thus only of those who felt ill or were exposed enough to be tested. Few tell us that a small percentage of those tested, when ill, have COVID-19, or the death rate is warped by those over 70 with accompanying heart, respirator, and cancer challenges.

When journalists talk of “20,000 cases!” they never remind their readers that nearly 99 percent recover from the virus that has stealthily been with us likely since mid-January, and of those 20,000 or so cases, a large number of the sick are already well. There is now a parlor game on the Internet of cutting and pasting clips from cable news, PBS, and NPR to reveal how inane and unthinking reporters have become.

Not so long ago, it was “bombshells,” “turning points,” “game-changers,” and “walls are closing in” to assure us that Robert Mueller was about to indict the entire Trump team. And now “we will never be the same,” “worse than the 1918 flu,” “xenophobia,” etc. have become the new parroting. Only an ignoramus or worse, would employ the terms “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan flu” for most of January and February, and then suddenly declare such terms racist when Donald Trump or his supporters copied such common media parlance.

Whereas no one believed the media in the past, no one especially likes them now, either. The more they in Pavlovian fashion equate coronavirus with the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, and Trump with Hitler, the more people, to the degree they hear of such silliness, tune them out.

Read the rest here. There is a ton more in this article that needs to be carefully digested.

9. You thought the CDC was bad? Check out what the NIH has been doing.

As much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient, the respected Yale University epidemiologist declared in a sobering assessment for a federal research agency that spends about $40 billion a year on medical studies.

He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.

There wasn’t enough in a $40 billion a year pot of money to plan for two pandemics?

As you weigh that question, consider this: In the 15 years since evidence first emerged that drugs like chloroquine might help in a coronavirus pandemic, NIH spent:

• $3.7 million so researchers at Oregon Health & Science University could compel monkeys to drink excessively to determine the impact of drunkenness on tissues, organs and central nervous systems.

• $3 million to study why lesbian women are likely to be two times more overweight than gay men.

• $700,107 for the study of the impact of televisions and gas generators on villages in Vietnam.

• $542,074 for a 12-episode soap opera on the love lives of HIV-infected patients.

• $3.54 million for a series of anti-obesity hip-hop songs to see if they would encourage kids to skip the fries and eat healthier.

• $35,000 for a University of Missouri study on whether text messaging college students before pre-football game tailgates would lead to less alcoholism.

• $350,000 for Yale University and Arizona State University to measure whether young adults between 21 and 30 would lose more money gambling if they drank alcohol.

• $721,000 for an Arizona company to develop a flight simulator to study drunken piloting.

Read the rest here. The very definition of waste, fraud, and abuse. The NIH needs to suffer the same fate as the FBI: tear it all down, re-purpose the agency, and start over.

10. The media continue to circle the drain.

Only one institution that Gallup asked about, the media, had negative approval rating — sitting 19 points behind its archenemy Donald Trump. And there are likely many other people and places that the public has more trust in than journalists.

This reality is a disaster for a liberal democracy, and much of it is brought on by the press’s own blinkered, sanctimonious, and transparently partisan temperament. On this topic, I could provide a book-length list of grievances. Every day brings an exasperating number of misleading and bad-faith takes by political journalists and “fact-checkers.”

The institutional bias at the Washington Post and the New York Times certainly isn’t new. But there used to be a corresponding level of professional gravitas that engendered reader trust.

Some of that trust has been corroded over years of Obama adulation, echo chambers, conspiracy mongering, and knee-jerk partisanship. Some of that trust has also been corroded by the litany of Trump-slaying “bombshells” that have fizzled over the past years. I don’t know how many times I’ve recently heard people affix “if it turns out to be true” to a breaking news story.

Read the rest here. Most of the legacy media need to be replaced by people off the street, who would almost certainly do a better job reporting the truth.

11. We will end this week’s news summary with a phenomenal article that compares President Trump’s leadership during the Chinese virus crisis with continual false allegations by the Democrat-media complex.

It has been a very long time since Americans last saw such a clear distinction between the considerable leadership qualities of their president, and the shameless political maneuverings of an opposition party constantly lusting for power.

In conjunction with the Trump administration’s around-the-clock efforts to accelerate the development of coronavirus diagnostic capabilities, treatments, and vaccines, on February 29 the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) issued emergency approval for the development of new commercial coronavirus tests. To enable this goal to be realized as quickly as possible, President Trump instructed the agency to dramatically cut the bureaucratic red tape that traditionally had stood in the way of swift action. Meanwhile, the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) provided large sums of money to help accelerate the production of diagnostic tests. Trump also issued emergency orders that allowed HHS “to immediately waive provisions of applicable laws and regulations to give [all] healthcare providers maximum flexibility to respond to the virus and care for patients.” And on March 16, the National Institutes of Health announced the start of a clinical trial aimed at creating a coronavirus vaccine — representing one of the fastest vaccine-development launches in the history of medicine.

But alas, Joe Biden was unimpressed. “The Obama-Biden Administration set up the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense,” he boasted, “to prepare for future pandemics like COVID-19” — the disease caused by the coronavirus. “Donald Trump eliminated it [the Directorate], and now we’re paying the price.” Trump’s “draconian cuts,” said Biden, were now costing people their lives.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s very serious charge caught the media’s attention on a grand scale. Too bad it was an unadulterated lie. Former National Security Council (NSC) official Tim Morrison, who was the senior director for counter-proliferation and bio-defense at the NSC when Trump’s “draconian cuts” had supposedly occurred, explains that the office in question was simply combined with others in a reorganization that “left the bio-defense staff unaffected.”

The coordinated campaign of premeditated lies and smears that the Democrats and their media mouthpieces have been waging against President Trump ever since the word “coronavirus” first entered the American people’s consciousness, has been obscene. But there is something else that also needs to be addressed. Have you noticed that even now — after the life-and-death dangers inherent in the Democrats’ open-borders, catch-and-release immigration policies have been thoroughly laid bare by the current crisis — Democrats in public office have been utterly silent about those dangers? Have you noticed that they have not ventured even to speculate that perhaps President Trump’s pre-coronavirus warnings about the need to regulate our nation’s borders were well-founded and had absolutely nothing to do with racism?

This is because the Democrat narrative never changes in any significant way. It merely makes minor adjustments for the sake of political expediency. So because right now it would be politically inconvenient to link racism to the type of border security that is very obviously a matter of life-and-death for many Americans, the Democrats have simply found a new way of framing their tried-and-true “racism” charade. Thus have we heard one Democrat after another intone their latest mantra-of-the-moment: the notion that Trump’s use of the term “China virus” is damnable proof of his “racism.”

Read the rest here. There is much, much more in this superb piece. The Democrats have exposed themselves once again as liars who are only interested in their own political power.

Here are this week’s “honorable mention” articles:

• It’s Barack Obama’s Fault There’s a Shortage of N95 Respirator Masks [Obama again. Will we EVER be rid of him?]
• The Psychology of Viral Paradoxes [This is what the Democrat-media complex are counting on.]
• Ex-Clinton adviser: Coronavirus pandemic ‘changes the presidential race overwhelmingly in Trump’s favor’ [Interesting analysis!]
• KLAVAN: Is There A Vaccine For Trump Derangement Syndrome? [The Chinese plague will be cured before TDS will.
• Trump’s White House coronavirus briefings draw ‘Bachelor,’ ‘MNF’ ratings [To the chagrin of the Democrat-medial complex.]
• Biden: ‘We Have To Take Care Of The Cure’ For COVID-19. ‘That Will Make The Problem Worse’ [Dementia and elder abuse.]
• Study Of 1918 Flu: Cities That Imposed Social Distancing Performed No Worse Economically Than Those That Didn’t — And Did Better Afterward [Lots of opinions on this subject.]
• Identity politics is the purveyor of real racism during coronavirus pandemic [Identity politics is cultural Marxism run amok.]
• As the Speaker Drags Her Feet on Relief, America Feels the Pelosi Bust [I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling the “Pelosi bust” for years. The woman is pure evil.]
• Media Peddle Bogus Wuhan Virus Stats To Bash America [Of course they do. They are still trying to “get Trump.”]
• Cuomo Deserves No Plaudits for His Handling of Crisis [But, he is being protected by the media.]

The Chinese plague continues to dominate the news, just as the globalists and Democrats have planned. Yet, there are other important news items that pop up that warrant our attention, including the elder abuse that the Democrats are perpetrating by propping up the demented Joe Biden. The virus has taken a LOT off the radar screen, including the various investigations that almost certainly are nearing completion. We are on the front edge of expanding authoritarianism in the US, too, as Democrat governors are beginning to take extreme measures that stray into partisan issues. Stay tuned!

The end.