I downloaded a pdf file of Sen. Ron Johnson’s “report” on Hunter Biden--wasn’t it supposed to be about father Joe?--but I haven’t been able to digest it yet, or at least the parts I have read are mostly indigestible tripe. But I’ll “digest” something from it tomorrow. There are real crises going on in this country, after all, including the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, which has now claimed the lives of over 200,000 people in this country. There are several clinical trials for a vaccine entering “phase 3”; the CDC describes the phases as “In Phase I, small groups of people receive the trial vaccine. In Phase II, the clinical study is expanded and vaccine is given to people who have characteristics (such as age and physical health) similar to those for whom the new vaccine is intended. In Phase III, the vaccine is given to thousands of people and tested for efficacy and safety.”
One of trials is being done by Johnson & Johnson, which claims on its website “Johnson & Johnson will develop and test its COVID-19 vaccine candidate in accordance with high ethical standards and sound scientific principles.” Like other vaccines currently under development in a “fast track” format, it is employing a genetically-engineered virus called an “adenoviral vector” that has a gene from the COVID-19 inserted in it, injected or ingested in the body, and used to “trick” the body into thinking it has the real virus, and “train” the body to automatically supply the capability to kill the virus. This is different from other methods in the past, such as injecting “dead” or weakened versions of the targeted virus. If there is a potential problem with the adenoviral method, it is that this is the first time it has been tried on a large scale as a vaccine, so there is no precedent to know how effective it will be; however, confidence abounds, although it still is unlikely to be approved for general use until at least early next year.
In the meantime, “high ethical standards” and “sound scientific principles” are still battling for the upper hand over Trump’s political fortunes. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has revealed that he felt compelled to tell HHS spokesperson Michael Caputo, and his then “science adviser,” Paul Alexander, to “take a hike” when they tried to force him and other scientists to “modify”and even silence their assessments of the COVID-19. Caputo is a partisan political hack who worked for the Trump campaign and was inserted into the HHS to do as much as damage on behalf of Trump as possible. When he largely failed to silence Fauci and others, he went on an insane rant accusing scientists of “sedition” and claimed he and his family were targeted for “assassination.” Caputo wrote tha “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president”--which of course many Trump diehards believe, which of course flies in the face of the evidence that Trump has from the beginning done whatever he could to insure that as many people were infected and died from the virus as “allowable” for his political survival.
There were those, like CDC Director Robert Redfield, who have disappointed many government disease experts as not being forceful enough in pushing back against Trump and his “experts,” backtracking from previous cautious statements whenever Trump attacked him for being “confused.” The Hill reported that morale was low at the CDC because of a perceived lack of backbone by Redfield, not helped when “senior CDC officials including Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat and Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, were sidelined after sounding the alarms over the dangers posed by the novel coronavirus.”
It has also been revealed that a member of the Kennedy clan, Max Kennedy Jr., had joined Jared Kushner’s “task force” on supplying PPE against the COVID-19 in the belief that it was a non-partisan affair that truly sought to stem the pandemic. Instead, as Kennedy told The New Yorker, Kushner’s operation was mostly composed of political “volunteers” rather than medical “experts” in order to “control the narrative.” Kennedy reported that “The volunteers were also instructed to prioritize requests from the President’s friends and supporters. According to Kennedy, the group paid special attention to Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News personality.” Pirro, Kennedy said, was “particularly aggressive,” and “demanded that masks be shipped to a hospital she favored.”
Kennedy was also “disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as ‘a marketing genius,’ because he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the states.” Kennedy described Kushner as having “an air of self-importance,” yet repeatedly failed to fix a single logistical issue he promised to address.
While Fauci was trying to "school" Sen. Rand Paul on so-called "herd immunity," Trump’s latest “science adviser,” Paul Atlas, was busy in his media appearances to be a one-man wrecking crew of the general scientific consensus on the virus; Atlas is a right-wing ideologue who in the past has called for the abolition of the ACA, and replacing it with a favorite yarn of the right--tax deductions and “savings” plans that are absolutely useless for lower income people, and does nothing to address coverage for preexisting conditions or nowhere near sufficient coverage for serious medical issues. This month, 78 of Atlas's former colleagues at the Stanford Medical School signed a letter decrying his influence on public policy, charging him of "falsehoods and misrepresentations of science that run counter to established science," that "undermine public health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy."
We can at least count on the citizenry to do the “right thing,” right? Well, maybe not everyone. Olympic volleyball gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings recently boasted on Instagram that she “braved” a trip to a grocery store without wearing a mask. It is not certain if she “forgot” to bring a mask, or outright refused to wear one even though it was required when entering the store. "I went shopping without a mask on & this is why. I read a quote the other day that shook me - - THIS HAS NOT BEEN ENFORCED, IT'S BEEN CONSENTED TO." This “message apparently “woke” her about her “right” to “stand up” for her “freedoms”--although she didn’t quite explain why it wasn’t “being reckless or putting others in danger” by not wearing a face mask in public spaces.
One person responded by calling Jennings “incredibly selfish and ignorant.” Jennings apologized, sort of, but she really wasn’t that sorry: "To those who are open to hearing where I am coming from, I appreciate your openness and civility. To those in agreement, I appreciate you expressing your views. To those calling me dumb, selfish, privileged, bigoted, and racist and telling me that 'you are better than this,' I fully acknowledge that addressing such an emotional, layered, nuanced and polarizing topic on social media was not the smartest thing." So much for just plain common sense and concern for the health and well-being others. To underline her conceit and arrogance, Jennings announced that she moving from California, apparently because she didn’t want to abide by the statewide mask mandate.
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