"When used under the conditions described in this authorization, the known and potential benefits of chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sulfate when used to treat COVID-19 outweigh the known and potential risks of such products," FDA Chief Scientist Denise M. Hinton wrote in the approval letter.
Michigan caves
Governor Whitmer saw the elephant, especially after the FDA also saw the elephant and authorized the use of chloroquine to treat COVID-19:
Sweden Goes Its Own Way
This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it will provide a laboratory for testing whether or not this approach is wise. If Sweden comes out ahead here, we may have to consider that our response ultimately did impose unnecessary costs on our nation in order to advance a misguided approach to the pandemic.
The other reason it's interesting to me is that Sweden is one of the premier countries held up as an exemplar by Bernie Sanders et al. Yet this approach is treated as a moral monstrosity when it is proposed by anyone here, or in the UK for that matter. How will they resolve the conflict that will create?
The other reason it's interesting to me is that Sweden is one of the premier countries held up as an exemplar by Bernie Sanders et al. Yet this approach is treated as a moral monstrosity when it is proposed by anyone here, or in the UK for that matter. How will they resolve the conflict that will create?
Hard Times All Around
Mexican cartels are really struggling.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has sent the price of heroin, methamphetamines and fentanyl soaring, as the likes of the Sinaloa cartel – and its main rival, the Jalisco “New Generation” – struggle to obtain the necessary chemicals to make the synthetic drugs, which typically come from China and are now in minimal supply.Even the cartels can't trust China, it seems.
“The cartels have suffered from COVID-19 due to the inability to get the regular shipments of synthetic opioids and precursor chemicals for the massive production of meth from China,” Derek Maltz, a former special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Operations Division in New York, told Fox News.
...
Obdola underscored fentanyl, which originates from China, has become the most coveted cartel commodity in recent weeks.
“In China, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), around 5,000 illegal drug laboratories have been processing synthetic drugs and chemicals to process them. Most of these drugs have Europe and North America as the main markets,” he continued.
Pulling up the drawbridge
My county has now closed the boat ramps, not because it's seriously a public health risk for people to go out in boats to fish, but because leaving them open felt too much like an invitation for careless yahoos to come visit. New short-term rentals and hotel/motel bookings are also halted for the next couple of weeks. Right now this tourist town has no patience for tourists. Everyone remembers the Spring Break and Mardi Gras idiots. No one wants even casual contact with anyone he doesn't know and trust to have been behaving responsibly.
There's huge anxiety over a Corpus Christi TV news station's report of 2 "Aransas" cases. Wherever the guy got his information, the chances are they didn't know the difference between two nearby towns with "Aransas" in their name and "Aransas County." Much Facebook bandwidth is now devoted to nailing down with perfect precision where the two culprits, if they exist at all, are located at this precise moment.
I'm telling people it doesn't make the tiniest difference. We can't know exactly how many cases are out there. We already know there are some (probably so far not many) cases fairly nearby. That's it, that's all you need to know, and as much as you possibly can know right now. You don't need to know who they are or exactly where they live, and we're not going to put the tiniest effort into finding that out for you or broadcasting it. You need to behave as though the disease were present, because if it isn't yet, it will be, and you'll never know exactly where it is no matter how infallible you think the TV news anchor or some "expert" is.
Nothing about this news changes how you need to behave: stay home as much as you can, and wash everything you touch, for your own sake and for the sake of your duty to neighbors. As far as your own emergency medical needs go, you don't have any yet, so here's the plan: LATER, if you're short of breath, call an ER and arrange to follow their protocols for going in. LATER, if you have a fever, be even more careful about contaminating anyone else, including your household. If you have both, do both. If you have a fever but aren't short of breath, keep isolating yourself as much as possible, and be ready on short notice to contact the ER if, and only if, you get short of breath. If you never get short of breath, then you're pretty much golden, so don't borrow trouble. Just don't spread it.
There's huge anxiety over a Corpus Christi TV news station's report of 2 "Aransas" cases. Wherever the guy got his information, the chances are they didn't know the difference between two nearby towns with "Aransas" in their name and "Aransas County." Much Facebook bandwidth is now devoted to nailing down with perfect precision where the two culprits, if they exist at all, are located at this precise moment.
I'm telling people it doesn't make the tiniest difference. We can't know exactly how many cases are out there. We already know there are some (probably so far not many) cases fairly nearby. That's it, that's all you need to know, and as much as you possibly can know right now. You don't need to know who they are or exactly where they live, and we're not going to put the tiniest effort into finding that out for you or broadcasting it. You need to behave as though the disease were present, because if it isn't yet, it will be, and you'll never know exactly where it is no matter how infallible you think the TV news anchor or some "expert" is.
Nothing about this news changes how you need to behave: stay home as much as you can, and wash everything you touch, for your own sake and for the sake of your duty to neighbors. As far as your own emergency medical needs go, you don't have any yet, so here's the plan: LATER, if you're short of breath, call an ER and arrange to follow their protocols for going in. LATER, if you have a fever, be even more careful about contaminating anyone else, including your household. If you have both, do both. If you have a fever but aren't short of breath, keep isolating yourself as much as possible, and be ready on short notice to contact the ER if, and only if, you get short of breath. If you never get short of breath, then you're pretty much golden, so don't borrow trouble. Just don't spread it.
Cooties
Did the press really just melt down because a guy who converted his factory to mask-making read from the Bible? Talk about purity obsessions.
As Ben Shapiro said, “If you’re angry at the guy shifting over his factory to produce 50,000 facemasks a day for medical professionals, you’re doing being human wrong.”
As Ben Shapiro said, “If you’re angry at the guy shifting over his factory to produce 50,000 facemasks a day for medical professionals, you’re doing being human wrong.”
A Worthy Question
Do these closure orders constitute eminent domain, being a destruction of private wealth for a public good, and thus merit compensation? I’d prefer the answer to be “yes,” though as a taxpayer I’d be on the hook for it. Limits on government power even in an emergency are needed. Otherwise government can always manufacture emergencies whenever it wants more power.
A statistical argument for chloroquine
A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Roy Spencer noted an inverse correlation between malaria and COVID-19 in hundreds of countries:
If I sort all 234 countries by incidence of malaria, and compute the average incidence of malaria and the average incidence of COVID-19, the results are simply amazing: those countries with malaria have virtually no COVID-19 cases, and those countries with many COVID-19 cases have little to no malaria.
Here are the averages for the three country groupings:
Top 40 Malaria countries:
212.24 malaria per thousand = 0.2 COVID-19 cases per million
Next 40 Malaria countries:
7.30 malaria per thousand = 10.1 COVID-19 cases per million
Remaining 154 (non-)Malaria countries:
0.00 malaria per thousand = 68.7 COVID-19 cases per millionOne possibility is the impact of widespread use of chloroquine as a long-term preventative for malaria. There are other possibilities, of course, including heat and humidity, but there also is an indication that patient populations being treated with chloroquine are not coming down with COVID-19. At least, I read that during the last week, but it's getting harder and harder to find a search engine that will generate any "chloroquine" results that aren't deeply skeptical and full of spiteful references to the Bad Man, fish-tank cleaner, and the suffering of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients, even while chloroquine manufacturers are dialing up cheap chloroquine production to 11 and donating doses by the tens of millions.
“We Cannot Direct The Wind, But We Can Adjust The Sails”
Dolly Parton reads bedtime stories. Do you know about Dolly Parton? She’s really something.
Outlaw Cinema For the People
For the next two months, REBELLER is going to be free to read. The legendary Joe Bob Briggs writes there often now.
Lockdown Time Now
North Carolina's just started one minute ago, and is scheduled to last until the end of next month.
Begging bureaucrats for beds
I'm pleased to see that Texas doesn't have a "certificate of need" program. Let's make the bureaucrats seek a public referendum to get a certificate of need for a CON program.
A lot of things need to change. November is coming.
A lot of things need to change. November is coming.
Red tape, red garbage
How many examples do we need of why everything the government touches becomes shoddy, overpriced, and in short supply?
Supply lines
One of the things that made me the most nervous a couple of weeks ago was the difficulty of ordering food online. We routinely order a number of things that our grocery store doesn't stock, so when the grocery stock aisles got iffy and I wanted to avoid crowds anyway, my first recourse was to Amazon. It was disquieting how many things suddenly were out, from beans to rice to canned anything to almost any kind of cleaning supplies. I checked again today, though, and found supplies almost in an ordinary condition.
I've been using the local grocery's curbside service. It's clunky; you get a delivery date that's a week out instead of same-day. Once you choose your items, there's a very limited ability to add anything else you may think of. Substitutions and outages are still common. Still, there's minimal personal contact, which is safer not only for us but for the workers. Considering the conditions they're operating under, they're doing a great job and trying hard to be both conscientious and flexible. Our lurking neighbors (hello, lurking neighbors!) are being even more careful than we are, minimizing risk to themselves and to the 99-year-old materfamilias onsite.
Most of the county is being at least fairly careful. There is a growing resentment of outsiders who arrive from who-knows-where having practiced who-knows-what hygiene. My own feeling is that it's more important how we all act in public than whether we've been here for a short or long time. It's all about the hands and the face, and overcoming that careless tendency to think it's no big deal to be in public with a fever or a cough.
The local restaurants are trying to hold on by offering take-out and delivery. Controversy is brewing over whether it's best to support the ones offering discounts, or the ones imposing surcharges. Again, my own feeling is that it's more important to keep the restaurant enterprises together, so they can preserve jobs, than to supply the community with cheaper entertainment. If we just want cheap food, we're all able to cook at home. Food supplies became inconvenient for a while, but never to the point of hunger; mostly we just had to be flexible about substitutions. Because Mr. Tex and I cook most of our food at home anyway, we didn't feel the disruption nearly as much as many did.
I've been using the local grocery's curbside service. It's clunky; you get a delivery date that's a week out instead of same-day. Once you choose your items, there's a very limited ability to add anything else you may think of. Substitutions and outages are still common. Still, there's minimal personal contact, which is safer not only for us but for the workers. Considering the conditions they're operating under, they're doing a great job and trying hard to be both conscientious and flexible. Our lurking neighbors (hello, lurking neighbors!) are being even more careful than we are, minimizing risk to themselves and to the 99-year-old materfamilias onsite.
Most of the county is being at least fairly careful. There is a growing resentment of outsiders who arrive from who-knows-where having practiced who-knows-what hygiene. My own feeling is that it's more important how we all act in public than whether we've been here for a short or long time. It's all about the hands and the face, and overcoming that careless tendency to think it's no big deal to be in public with a fever or a cough.
The local restaurants are trying to hold on by offering take-out and delivery. Controversy is brewing over whether it's best to support the ones offering discounts, or the ones imposing surcharges. Again, my own feeling is that it's more important to keep the restaurant enterprises together, so they can preserve jobs, than to supply the community with cheaper entertainment. If we just want cheap food, we're all able to cook at home. Food supplies became inconvenient for a while, but never to the point of hunger; mostly we just had to be flexible about substitutions. Because Mr. Tex and I cook most of our food at home anyway, we didn't feel the disruption nearly as much as many did.
A Small Cost of Social Distancing
Yesterday I went for a motorcycle ride in the country. I came across a cow loose in the road, as occurs from time to time. I had a very strong impulse to stop, as I normally would, and help return the cow to her pasture. I generally feel a duty to do that sort of thing, and I wanted to do it. On any normal day I would have done it, but on this day I realized I had conflicting duties.
On this day, there was already a crowd of people standing around -- uselessly as far as I could tell -- and I could tell that it would be impossible to avoid interacting with them. They had clearly called for help, and were numerous enough that people would notice them and slow down (thus avoiding collision with the cow). Everything's easier to catch here than back in Georgia, where flatter land and wider rivers made it easy for livestock to get free and go a long ways. They probably managed the fairly easy task of herding one cow down into her pasture.
I rode on and left them to deal with it, with sad regret. It's likely enough we soon will have worse things to regret than the lost chance to help catch a loose cow, but I hated to go on without helping. I was one person there who really knew how to deal with the problem having dealt with that particular problem some several times before. I could have been a help, but this time I was no help at all.
On this day, there was already a crowd of people standing around -- uselessly as far as I could tell -- and I could tell that it would be impossible to avoid interacting with them. They had clearly called for help, and were numerous enough that people would notice them and slow down (thus avoiding collision with the cow). Everything's easier to catch here than back in Georgia, where flatter land and wider rivers made it easy for livestock to get free and go a long ways. They probably managed the fairly easy task of herding one cow down into her pasture.
I rode on and left them to deal with it, with sad regret. It's likely enough we soon will have worse things to regret than the lost chance to help catch a loose cow, but I hated to go on without helping. I was one person there who really knew how to deal with the problem having dealt with that particular problem some several times before. I could have been a help, but this time I was no help at all.
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