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{ founderscode.com } ~ At a news conference, President Donald Trump praised how quickly the research had progressed. Fauci noted that 65 days have passed since Chinese scientists shared the virus’ genetic sequence... He said he believed that was a record for developing a vaccine to test. This vaccine candidate, code-named mRNA-1273, was developed by the NIH and Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected because the shots do not contain the coronavirus itself. It’s not the only potential vaccine in the pipeline. Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine against COVID-19. Another candidate, made by Inovio Pharmaceuticals, is expected to begin its own safety study next month in the U.S., China and South Korea. The Seattle experiment got underway days after the World Health Organization declared the new virus outbreak a pandemic because of its rapid global spread, which has infected more than 169,000 people and killed more than 6,500. AP reporter(s) witnessed the first human trial on Monday. Other medical procedures are underway in hundreds of forms to combat the Covid-19 outbreak. A very old drug developed by a scientist in 1934 for Bayer discovered chloroquine for malaria. It was widely used during World War ll and has been extensively used for SARS with excellent results. Its history goes back to Peru South America, where the indigenous people extracted the bark of the Cinchona trees and used the extract Chinchona officinalis to fight chills and fever in the seventeenth century. In 1633 this herbal medicine was introduced in Europe, where it was given the same use and also began to be used against malaria. We report on chloroquine, a 4-amino-quinoline, as an effective inhibitor of the replication of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in vitro. Chloroquine is a clinically approved drug effective against malaria. It was reported a few weeks ago that officials in China were not cooperating with other nations at the outset of Covid-19. That is only partially true. The U.S. has collaborated with scientists and medical experts in China since SARS and continues to do so with very positive results. Data from the drug’s studies showed ‘certain curative effect’ with ‘fairly good efficacy’. According to Sun, patients treated with chloroquine demonstrated a better drop in fever, improvement of lung CT images, and required a shorter time to recover compared to parallel groups. The percentage of patients with negative viral nucleic acid tests was also higher with the anti-malarial drug. Chloroquine has so far showed no obvious serious adverse reactions in the more than 100 participants in the trials. The China National Center for Biotechnology Development head Zhang Xinmin said that chloroquine is one of the three drugs that have a promising profile against the new coronavirus, reported China Daily. The remaining two drugs are anti-flu medicine favipiravir and Gilead’s investigational anti-viral candidate remdesivir.  Favipiravir is currently in a 70-patient trial in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, while remdesivir is under evaluation at more than ten medical institutions in Wuhan. In trials conducted in China, chloroquine appears to be useful for coronavirus disease 2019. Another form is Hydroxychloroquine.  Hydroxychloroquine is also presecribed for HIV, arthritis as well as advanced malaria and strains of coronavirus. It is a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug DMARD. It regulates the activity of the immune system, which may be overactive in some conditions. A small 40 cents, that is $.40 a dose to make and is generally sold for $5.00 per dose.

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{ americanthinker.com } ~ One of my Maxims is that “the only warrant for government power is existential peril.” The problem is that most of the time there isn’t any existential peril, and so, if you are interested in power, you have to make it up... Thus, the Commies are coming, the Nazis are coming, the world is going to end -- because pollution or climate or plastic -- unless we act now. But occasionally a real existential peril comes along, like right now with the Wuhan Flu -- yeah, call me a racist, why dontcha -- and so the president gets up and acts like the protector of his people and declares a state of emergency. But some idiots are arguing about whether he acted too soon or too late. Our Democratic operatives with bylines decided it was racist to suspend air travel from China until they decided that using the wrong name for the virus was xenophobic. The technocratic cognoscenti in Europe in their wisdom reckoned that the best thing was to do nothing and let the epidemic take its course until it died out once the European population acquired “herd immunity.” But Boris Johnson in the UK suddenly did what the Brits call a “U-turn” on this. That’s because the job of the British prime minister is to protect the Brits from existential threats, human or viral. I suspect that when the Leader of the Nation is busily protecting the people from an existential threat it is not a good idea to be arguing about whether he acted too soon or too late. Because we herd animals will protect the leader that is acting to protect us. Indeed, it is usually not a good idea to criticize the sainted leader even after the emergency is over. Just try doing a bit of revisionism on Winston Churchill and FDR and see where it gets you. Right now, people are afraid of the Wuhan Peril, and we want to be protected. Our leaders and opinion makers are learning this the hard way because they were all carefully taught that the thing to hate and to fear was racism, sexism, toxic masculinity. Oh, and Third-World poverty. So it’s not surprising that our betters have suddenly decided that today’s problem is the xenophobia of people that call it the Wu Flu instead of COVID-19...

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by fox5dc.com ~ A clinical trial evaluating a vaccine designed to protect against the new coronavirus will begin Monday, according to a government official...  The first participant in the trial will receive the experimental vaccine on Monday, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the trial has not been publicly announced yet. The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, the official said. Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests. Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines — shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to produce than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent. Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed...   https://www.fox5dc.com/news/first-dose-to-be-delivered-monday-in-clinical-trial-for-potential-covid-19-vaccine   

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{ thefederalist.com } ~ At Sunday night’s debate, Democratic presidential contender loose lips liar-Joe Biden blatantly lied to the American public about the Trump administration’s handling of coronavirus testing in a pathetic attempt... to push the false narrative that a lack of testing has endangered Americans. “The World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they had available and to give it to us now,” loose lips liar-Biden proclaimed.” “We refused it. We didn’t want to buy them,” the Democratic front-runner claimed. loose lips liar-Biden’s claim was false on many fronts and had previously been debunked on at least two occasions. First, during a March 7, 2020 press briefing, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn made clear that there were no World Health Organization (WHO) “testing kits.” Hahn told reporters: “We’ve seen reports about a WHO test, and that WHO is distributing a diagnostic test to countries. And I want to be really clear about this: We’ve been in constant contact with WHO. The WHO does not have its own test that it is distributing globally. It has only posted on its website protocols from some test developers, including our own CDC.” During the question and answer period that followed, a reporter inquired whether the WHO actually developed a test. “So they don’t actually” develop tests, that is not “their expertise,” Hahn responded. Instead, as Hahn explained, the WHO “acts as an information exchange,” and “so if there’s information available regarding a test that’s put on their webpage so that others can, you know, look at that for technical assistance.” Azar then further corrected the press’s misunderstanding of the WHO rumor. A German lab, the FDA head explained, had “developed a recipe protocol for a lab-developed test and the WHO took that and put that out.” “That’s what’s often been called—misleadingly—the WHO test,” Azar said, adding that “they also got the CDC recipe and also put that out.”...   https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/17/joe-biden-lies-about-coronavirus-testing-to-make-trump-look-bad/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=d3573ba730-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-d3573ba730-83771801 

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{ thefederalist.com  } ~ Early Saturday morning, I voted against the liar-Pelosi-Mnuchin Wuhan virus legislation my colleagues and I had no time to debate, amend, or even read... In a time when we need to come together and do things the right way, we passed badly flawed legislation without doing our due diligence to ensure our solution does more harm than good. Where to start? The bill purports to help people by putting a massive mandate on small and medium-sized businesses while perpetuating the K-Street Corporate welfare cronyism Americans are sick of – exempting businesses over 500. Worse yet, the mandate was to be paid later through tax credits, and the tax credits would not even cover it all. This was a terrible mistake, and the Senate or the House, in its “technical corrections,” it is hurrying to the floor to clean up its mess ought to correct it. Small business owners have reached out to me to ask what we can do to help stop this so they won’t be hurt. In short, it does no good to mandate “paid leave” from a job that doesn’t exist because the business went under. To solve that problem, I suggest – and would have on Friday, had we had the chance to speak, let alone put forth amendments – offering very expansive and immediate small business loans, and other measures to keep businesses afloat through the negative impacts of government calls to stay home. Due to the action and recommendation of government leaders of all levels, we are facing massive slowdown for restaurants, retail, the arts, travel, hotels, and more. It is fully and wholly unsustainable for most. Therefore, we have a duty to find ways to inject capital and help them stay afloat – and tie any temporary sick leave requirement to the choice of the business to take the loan rather than through the force of penalty. We should get busy using tax relief. Be it with deferring tax filing or quarterly payments or otherwise to provide immediate relief. For the unfortunate folks who, starting this week, are likely getting laid off due directly to government action, particularly in the service industry, we are going to have to find ways besides taxes to provide additional relief. It’s not clear the Unemployment Insurance relief in the House bill will sufficiently or effectively deal with the magnitude of the impact on service industry workers...

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{ washingtonexaminer.com } ~ China is engaged in a wide-scale propaganda effort to convince the world that it is not responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic... portraying itself with carefully distributed disinformation as being the most proactive, intelligent, and responsible of the world superpowers. And many in America's free press are happy to help China gaslight the entire world. “China Bought the West Time. The West Squandered It,” reads the headline to an opinion article published Friday by the New York Times. Earlier, on Thursday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hosted reporter Donald McNeil, who explained that China has had “enormous success in beating down its epidemic” because of its advancements in healthcare technology, testing, and mandatory quarantines. Maddow thanked McNeil at the end of the segment for explaining so convincingly the “distance between” what China has done to fight COVID-19 and “what we’re preparing for.” Later, on social media, the Maddow show shared a clip of the segment with the headline “How coronavirus testing works in a country that takes the problem seriously.” Elsewhere this week, the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum asked on social media, “China has reacted to the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy by sending aid. The U.S. has reacted by suspending flights. Who is the superpower?” Let’s get the facts straight. COVID-19 has spread to more than 120 countries, claiming more than 5,000 lives, precisely because of the Chinese government’s arrogance and incompetence. Chinese authorities knew about the virus in December of last year when it first appeared in the city of Wuhan. Instead of taking cautious measures and sharing what they knew about the disease with the rest of the world, China’s government engaged in a massive cover-up, hoping that maybe it would all just go away...  https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/western-media-parroting-chinese-communist-party-propaganda   

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{ fdd.org } ~ Oil prices have been cratering in the wake of Saudi Arabia’s decision to ramp up production and offer customers a discount for its crude... A decade ago, that would have been welcome news for the United States. But now, as the US oil industry grows — transforming the United States into one of the top exporters — the crash in prices threatens to cause as much pain as relief. This underscores an important dynamic: The United States continues to remain too reliant on oil. Saudi Arabia’s decision to open its taps comes after talks with OPEC and non-OPEC producers, led by Russia, collapsed last week. Prices had already been sliding dangerously as coronavirus fears battered global demand for oil. Then Saudi Arabia escalated things when it slashed the price of its exports by $6 to $8 per barrel and announced it will also increase production by 2.5 million barrels per day by April 1. Brent crude, the international benchmark oil price, fell by more than 9% last week to $45.27 a barrel when OPEC and non-OPEC members failed to agree on a deal. And the day after Saudi Arabia announced its price war, US crude prices toppled to $31.13 per barrel, notching its worst one-day loss since 1991.While the global decline in oil prices will certainly cause pain for both Saudi Arabia and Russia, its impact on US oil producers, especially many of the smaller shale producers, could be especially severe. Even major companies like Chevron and Exxon saw their stocks fall, while Occidental Petroleum — which took on significant debt to acquire a different US producer in 2019 — announced a major cut to its dividend. The Trump administration is surely sympathetic to the plight of US shale producers suffering from decisions made in Saudi Arabia and Russia — both of whom would like nothing better than to see their US competitors go under. President Trump has made promoting America’s new-found energy independence a major priority, and his vitriol against  OPEC is well-known. It wouldn’t be surprising if the White House sought federal aid for shale companies buffeted by the price fallout. While such a move would be welcome amongst hurting shale producers and the tens of thousands of people that the industry employs, it would be a stopgap measure, at best. The shale revolution has been good for America, but it has only reduced — not ended — our reliance on foreign producers. As Riyadh and Moscow just demonstrated, authoritarian regimes overseas still have the capability to wield the oil weapon against the United States, albeit with low prices now instead of high prices. If the United States really wants to attain energy independence, becoming a net exporter of oil isn’t enough. What America needs is a comprehensive vision for energy security, one that goes beyond fossil fuel independence...

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