Trump just suggested treating covid by “bringing sunlight inside the body.” 
WTF? I have read about something like this as a medieval torture/execution thing, but as medical treatment? Wow…
Great. Now I’ve got an image somewhere between blood eagle and demon core kun, bouncing around in my head. Good thing it’s nowhere close to bedtime.
The actual death rate is certainly lower than 7%. That still leaves a lot of room for some very scary possibilities.
For death rate, there are few if any false positives, and likely they are missing a bunch, from looking at increase in overall mortality, rather than just confirmed cases.
Bearing that in mind, if this antibody study is an accurate sample, that gives an actual case fatality rate of ~0.8-1.5%. This is broadly in line with other similar estimates from other places, and is still terrifying. If we did a “herd immunity “ strategy over the whole US, that would be 3-4 million people dead.
So this doesn’t really make the situation any better than what we already knew.
Yup. 7.4% fatality rate is just slightly lower than playing Russian roulette with one bullet in two guns. (8.3%)
I’m sure he was just riffing on how the Krebs Cycle run backwards is so similar to photosynthesis, so that’s his in-joke way of suggesting that us animals should keep ourselves in good nutritional shape by consuming more plants.
Yes. Also with the findings that some some are testing lower than expected in antibodies, herd immunity is even being questioned.
Then there is the whole discussion about outcomes where people do survive, and future medical issues from complications, that gets swept under the rug.
He then followed it up by asking whether we could inject people with disinfectant.
Hey Trump! You go first!
Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, is a Republican lawyer who once clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and counts current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a friend.
From 1994 to 1996, he served as an Associate Independent Counsel for Ken Starr in the United States Office of the Independent Counsel, where he worked on the first two years of the investigation into the Whitewater controversy.
Azar became President of Lilly USA, LLC, the largest division of Eli Lilly and Company, and was responsible for the company’s entire operations in the United States.[18] Prices for drugs rose substantially under Azar’s leadership, including the tripling of the cost of the company’s top-selling insulin drug. Also under Azar’s watch, Eli Lilly was one of three companies accused in a class-action lawsuit of exploiting the drug pricing system to increase profits for insulin. Eli Lilly was also fined in Mexico for colluding on the price of insulin.
HHS is a behemoth department, overseeing almost every federal public health agency in the country, with a $1.3 trillion budget that exceeds the gross national product of most countries.
|Program|Funding (in billions)|
|Management and Finance|
|Departmental Management|$1.4|
|Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund|$1.4|
|Operating Divisions|
|Food and Drug Administration|$2.6|
|Health Resources and Services Administration|$10.4|
|Indian Health Service|$4.8|
|Centers for Disease Control and Prevention|$6.7|
|National Institutes of Health|$30.4|
|Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration|$3.4|
|Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality|$0.4|
|Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services|$906.8|
|Administration for Children and Families|$51.3|
|Administration for Community Living|$2.1|
Whether Americans know it or not, their government is not working for them. Their government is working on behalf of capital. Humans are now a mere second-order, instrumental factor to be considered based on how it affects capital. In this perilous time, capital must be protected and nurtured, and we must draw resources from our entire society in order to help capital survive, in the same way that the body will draw blood from other organs to save the brain. People can be sacrificed—capital is irreplaceable. We are navigating our way through this so that capital comes out okay on the other side. It is no exaggeration to say that tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans will die because we are choosing this approach, rather than an approach that prioritizes human life. They will die because we did not dedicate resources before this pandemic to building an adequate system of public health care, and they will die because we made the decision during this pandemic to put the needs of capital first. We did not keep working people on payrolls, because that would be less advantageous for the owners of capital. We did not nationalize factories, nor pharmaceuticals, because that would be less advantageous to the owners of capital. And of course we did not release the prisoners in the jails being ravaged by this disease. What would that do for the stock market?
Genius
President Trump is asking whether there can be some sort of disinfectant injection, “almost a cleaning,” in people’s bodies to fight the coronavirus.
“It would be interesting to check that,” he said.
He added, “The whole concept of the light. That’s pretty powerful.”
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Can’t wait to see how the New York Times writes this one up. “PRESIDENT RECOMMENDS INNOVATIVE NEW TREATMENT.”
@YamicheLasers…
