Further Discussion About Covid-19 and the Covid-19 Crisis 2020

But it can be such a hoot watching as they twist words and writhe in nervous anticipation of being outed as frauds, liars...

You talking about the media and Obama and his administration's suck puppies? Sure sounds like it.

How should we hold a president accountable for spying on his political opponents? Any ideas beside the firing squad?

It would if only they were a little bit smarter. As it is they don’t understand when they’ve lost the argument and continue spouting their lies and bigotry if nothing had happened.

It’s like the dinosaur too stupid to realise it’s dead crashing on for however many minutes before the message finally gets through. Only in this case it never does.

Did anyone ever think to ask Trump what he would do to prepare for any major epidemic or pandemic if he had been elected president back between 2015 and 2016?

Did anyone ever ask what would Trump do for any such contingency?

What was Trump's response? I don't recall Trump ever talking about disease control during his presidential campaign.

Insulting Charles teacher like that is really nasty. His teacher made much more since than Living did. And she has proven she/he dident investigate unions because she/he dosent. Know jack shyt about them.

Yes he was asked many many times, and his answer was always some version of "You won't believe how good it will be" You'll get tired of winning, you're gonna win so much", "I know the best people".

In other words, he lies like a rug.

Think of it this way: I had a friend threaten me.

I noticed something about the covid-19 stats. They post 1, 600,000 people that tested positive for the virus. Not all these people got sick. As far as I can tell 450,000 did get sick. 97,500 died from the virus or complications. That's about .22%. Not ..02%. Is our cdc playing with numbers to make Trump more electable in 2020? I know if I was tested for the flu I would test positive for it as I have had it this year and last even though I got my shots. So what does the 1,600,000 number really mean?

People will display varying degrees of symptoms. Not everyone needs be hospitalized. The same occurs with the annual influenza. One can be asymptomatic.

I would like to see the numbers for hospital deaths for people hospitalized for things other than covid. Would the deaths reach .22%?

Not being a statistician, I've never compiled those numbers. Odds are you can locate them on the internet. I've seen some articles about it, just didn't save them. (alert Goldman, the articles were not saved!)

Trump’s favorite COVID-19 drug might actually increase risk of death

https://www.popsci.com/story/health/hydroxychloroquinecoronavirus-study-risk/

A sweeping new analysis on hydroxychloroquine suggests no benefits against the virus—and potentially fatal risks.
Rachel Feltman
Updated: May 22, 2020

This isn't the final word on the drug, but it looks like another nail in the coffin.

Follow all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage here, including news on federal policies, the latest on immune-response research, and a state-by-state breakdown of confirmed cases.

For weeks, hydroxychloroquine has been making headlines as a hotly contested therapy for treating patients with COVID-19. President Donald Trump publicly praised the antimalarial drug on numerous occasions, and on Monday he claimed he’d been taking it himself for the last week and a half. But the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned back in April that the medication could cause heart problems, and most experts agree that taking it as protection against COVID-19 is a bad idea.

Now, there’s further evidence to the perils of using hydroxychloroquine and the related drug chloroquine. In the largest analysis to date, scientists found that in addition to showing no benefit to patients hospitalized for COVID-19, people who take the medications are at higher risk of suffering heart problems while hospitalized—and may even be more likely to die. The drugs seem particularly dangerous when combined with antibiotics.

The study, published Friday in The Lancet, isn’t conclusive, and it won’t be the final word on hydroxychloroquine. Instead of a randomized control study, where groups of patients are either given a medication or put on a placebo, this paper merely analyzed the health outcomes of COVID-19 patients who’d already been hospitalized and treated. While a randomized control trial (like the one currently being run in Thailand and Great Britain) can ensure that a large variety of patients are receiving the drug in question, a study that looks back on existing data may be skewed by the fact that doctors were more likely to prescribe it to severely ill patients. This leaves out valuable information on how people with mild or moderate symptoms fare on the therapy; but with some 96,000 patients at 671 different hospitals across six continents included, the new results are still compelling.

“"Our data has very convincingly shown that in a real-world population this drug combination, whichever way you slice it or dice it, does not show any evidence of benefit, and in fact, is immutably showing a signal of grave harm," Mandeep Mehra, medical director of Brigham and Women’s Heart & Vascular Center and lead author of the review, told CNN.

“It’s a very striking finding and it’s convincing to me,” Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told STAT. “Based upon these findings and others, no one should take hydroxychloroquine with or without an antibiotic unless they are in a randomized controlled trial. It should not be used in the general population to prevent or to treat COVID-19 infection.”

Retail sales of hydroxychloroquine in March—after Trump began bringing up the drug at press conferences—were twice as high as they’d been at the same time a year before. While figures for April and May aren’t available yet, the drug has been hard to come by for those taking it for Lupus and
other autoimmune diseases, for which it has FDA approval.



FOLLOW THE MONEY!

You will end up at Fauci's house.

The trail will end at a stockholder's arrest

Tell them he spied on Americans illegally too.

Tell 'em "piss up a rope!"

From NEWSMAX!!!

Trump Signs Law Allowing Mass Spying on Citizens

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House January 24, 2018, in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By Andrew Napolitano Thursday, 25 January 2018 12:01 AM Current | Bio | Archive

During the past three weeks, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law vast new powers for the NSA and the FBI to spy on innocent Americans and selectively to pass on to law enforcement the fruits of that spying.

Those fruits can now lawfully include all fiber-optic data transmitted to or in the United States, such as digital recordings of all landline and mobile telephone calls and copies in real time of all text messages and emails and banking, medical and legal records electronically stored or transmitted.

All this bulk surveillance had come about because the National Security Agency convinced federal judges meeting in secret that they should authorize it. Now Congress and the president have made it the law of the land.

This enactment came about notwithstanding the guarantee of the right to privacy — the right to be left alone — articulated in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and elsewhere. Though the surveillance expansion passed the Senate by just one vote, it apparently marks a public policy determination that the Constitution can be ignored or evaded by majority consent whenever it poses an obstacle to the government's purposes.

The language of the Fourth Amendment is an intentional obstacle to the government in deference to human dignity and personal liberty. It reads: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

This specific language was expressly written to prevent the bulk suspicionless surveillance that the British government had used against the colonists. British courts in London issued general warrants to British soldiers in America, authorizing them to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found. These warrants were not based on probable cause, and they did not describe the place to be searched or the people or things to be seized.

The Colonial reaction to the British use of general warrants was to take up arms and fight the American Revolution.

Last week, Congress and the president chose to ignore our history and the human values underlying the right to privacy. Those values recognize that the individual pursuit of happiness is best actualized in an atmosphere free from the government's prying eyes. Stated differently, the authors and ratifiers of the Fourth Amendment recognized that a person is not fully happy when being watched all the time by the government.

Yet the constitutional values and timeless lessons of history were not only rejected by Congress but also rejected in ignorance, and the ignorance was knowingly facilitated by the members of the House Intelligence Committee.

Here is the back story.

The recent behavior of the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee constitutes incompetence at best and misconduct in office at worst. The leadership sat on knowledge of NSA and FBI surveillance abuses that some committee members have characterized as "career-ending," "jaw-dropping" and "KGB-like," while both houses of Congress — ignorant of what their 22 House Intelligence Committee colleagues knew — voted to expand NSA and FBI surveillance authorities.

Stated differently, the 22 members of the committee knowingly kept from their 500 or so congressional colleagues incendiary information that, had it been revealed in a timely manner, would certainly have affected the outcome of the vote — particularly in the Senate, where a switch of just one vote would have prevented passage of this expansion of bulk surveillance authorization.

Why were all members of Congress but the 22 on this committee kept in the dark about NSA and FBI lawlessness? Why didn't the committee reveal to Congress what it claims is too shocking to discuss publicly before Congress voted on surveillance expansion? Where is the outrage that this information was known to a few in the House and kept from the remainder of Congress while it ignorantly voted to assault the right to privacy?

The new law places too much power in the hands of folks who even the drafters of it have now acknowledged are inherently unworthy of this trust. I argued last week that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was up to something when he publicly attacked the trustworthiness of the NSA and FBI folks whose secret powers he later inexplicably voted to expand. Now we know what he was talking about.

What can be done about this?

The House Intelligence Committee should publicly reveal the contents of its four-page report that summarizes the NSA and FBI abuses. If that fails, a courageous member of the committee should go to the floor of the House — as Sen. Dianne Feinstein once took the CIA torture report to the floor of the Senate — and reveal not just the four-page report but also the underlying data upon which the report is based. Members of Congress enjoy full immunity for anything said on the House or Senate floor, yet personal courage is often in short supply.

But there is a bigger picture here than House Intelligence Committee members sitting on valuable intelligence and keeping it from their colleagues. The American people are entitled to know how the government in whose hands we have reposed the Constitution for safekeeping has used and abused the powers we have given to it. The American people are also entitled to know who abused power and who knew about it and remained silent.

Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government? In theory, of course, the government works for us. In practice, it treats us as children. Why do we accept this from a government to which we have consented? Democracy dies in darkness. So does personal freedom.


Judge Andrew P. Napolitano was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of New Jersey. He is Fox News’ senior judicial analyst. Napolitano has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He is the author of the best-seller, "Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History." For more of Judge Napolitano's reports, Go Here Now.

From a REPUBLICAN HOUSE UNDER PAUL RYAN & TRUMP!

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/11/16878220/house-vote-surveillance-spying-fisa

The House voted to allow the NSA to keep spying on Americans

Section 702 lives.
By Alex [email protected]@vox.com Jan 11, 2018, 5:50pm EST



House Speaker Paul Ryan Holds Weekly News Conference At The Capitol
Zach Gibson/Getty Images

A debate over a controversial law that gives the government broad powers to spy on foreigners purposefully and Americans incidentally briefly rocked both the White House and Capitol Hill on Thursday after a disruptive tweet by President Donald Trump.

A section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Section 702, allows US intelligence agencies to collect the email communications of foreigners living abroad in order to obtain information about potential threats against the United States. But sometimes intelligence agencies sweep up emails sent by or to Americans, and that worries citizens and policymakers alike who care about their privacy.

It also evidently worries President Trump.

On Thursday morning, as the House of Representatives was about to begin deliberations on an amendment to the law that would help safeguard Americans’ privacy by requiring government officials to request a warrant before looking at information collected from emails by US intelligence agencies — the president posted a tweet criticizing the law:

“House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2018

Panicked Republicans considered pulling the bill because they thought the president was against it. But about 90 minutes after his first tweet, Trump posted a follow-up tweet that seemed to walk back his opposition to the law:

With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2018

The amendment ultimately didn’t pass, but the House did vote to reauthorize the law for another six years by a 256 to 164 margin.

Thursday’s drama is just the latest moment in the years-long controversy over the US government’s ability to collect, store, and even read the emails involving American citizens and residents because of FISA’s Section 702.

Here’s a brief guide on what Section 702 lets America’s intelligence agencies do — and why it’s long been a sensitive issue for Americans in and out of government.
Section 702 targets foreigners’ emails — but there’s a catch

Section 702 doesn’t allow intentional surveillance targeting of Americans; rather, targeting of “accounts whose owners are reasonably believed to be foreigners outside of the United States,” Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and NSA, told me.

The law is intended to collect information that could potentially stop terrorist attacks by foreigners against the United States, but sometimes the spying programs scoop up Americans’ emails and information along with it.

“Most of the world’s internet traffic passes through portals inside the United States,” said Todd Rosenblum, a top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2011. Because of that, it’s difficult not to unintentionally collect information from or about US citizens and residents.

Critics believe that violates Americans’ Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The FISA court is supposed to be the legal check on the government’s surveillance powers. Made up of 11 judges, the court is who ultimately decides whether or not intelligence officials can look at email content or other data as part of a national security investigation.

Proponents argue that this court serves as a sufficient check on the government’s powers; critics, on the other hand, say the court provides nothing more than a rubber-stamp for whatever the intelligence agencies ask for.

The debate over the FISA court is just one of the many controversies surrounding Section 702. At the core, the question is whether the government should prioritize the security of the American people, or their privacy.
The privacy versus security battle continues

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) co-sponsored the failed amendment to add new safeguards to Section 702, along with Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI).

“Because of the architecture of the internet, we are collecting vast amounts of data,” Lofgren told me. “Your phone calls, your emails, your text messages, and video messages. And under Section 702 you can search that for Americans and for crimes that have nothing to do with terrorism.”

Privacy advocates also point to the potential for the law to be abused. “Section 702 could too easily be a tool to target government critics, immigrants, and vulnerable communities,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative director at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Such cases have happened. In May 2015, for instance, FBI agents arrested a man named Xiaoxing Xi, a Chinese-American physics professor at Temple University. The government claimed he was a Chinese spy after looking at his communications with the FISA Court’s approval. The government dropped the charges four months later because it appeared he was merely contacting colleagues in China. Xi is now working with the ACLU to sue for damages.

Hayden and many others in the intelligence community have a different view of Section 702. On October 23, Hayden and 15 other national security professionals — including former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — signed a letter to congressional leaders urging them to reauthorize the email-collection provision.

“There is no substitute for Section 702,” they wrote. “It is the most effective mechanism to protect the US from the very large number of real threats that use American email and Internet services.”

The debate over Section 702 now moves to the Senate, where it will likely not spark the same level of controversy as it did in the House vote on Thursday. So far, senators from both parties have signaled they will reauthorize Section 702 without any additional reforms to ensure greater privacy. But the wider debate about striking the right balance between citizen privacy and security is sure to continue.