Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

TOO MUCH CAUTION IS KILLING COVID PATIENTS

Today Josoeph A. Ladapo published an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal: "Too Much Caution is Killing Covid Patients.   Thesis: "Doctors should follow the evidence for promising therapies.  Instead they demand certainty."   Dr. Ladapo writes (excerpts):  [my bolding]

"The health system would be less burdened if more patients were treated before they require hospitalization, and there are promising therapeutic options that patients can administer themselves at home. This was the subject of a Nov. 19 hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. 

Testimony from the hearing underscored an important issue: Too many doctors have interpreted the term “evidence-based medicine” to mean that the evidence for a treatment must be certain and definitive before it can be given to patients.  Because accusing a physician of not being “evidence based” can be a career-damaging allegation, fear of straying from the pack has prevailed, favoring inertia and inaction amid uncertainty about Covid-19 treatments.   . . . When options are limited and there are safe treatments with evidence for effectiveness, holding out for certainty can be catastrophic.

The most auspicious path forward is for local and state governments, research institutions, community clinics and Covid-19 testing sites to provide patients with access to promising outpatient treatments while collecting data about health outcomes.    With almost 200,000 new Covid-19 cases daily in the U. S., uncertainty about effectiveness could be resolved within a few weeks. Until then, it is up to patients to demand outpatient treatment. Political leaders have largely been silent, and most physicians have been telling Covid-19 patients to quarantine and hope for the best rather than prescribing early treatment.

. . .  Treating high-risk patients with Covid-19 at home using safe medications is the most promising public-health strategy for preventing hospital overcrowding and death.   Full article here.

** Also see an excellent Nov. 16, 2020 LifeSite article, What government and media won't tell you about how to protect you and your loved ones from COVID.   It includes excellent links for further information.

Victor Davis Hanson - The Urban-Rural Divide in America

**  Victor Davis Hanson - On the urban/rural divide in the United States.

Excerpts:

. . . . The media figures who report on the election are urban denizens. Few have any idea of why half the country votes as it does. So they just assume that pollsters, like themselves, are better educated, smarter, and of greater value to society than those whom they often to fail to find in their surveys. . . 

That fact of the rural/urban dichotomy is underappreciated, but it remains at the heart of the Constitution — to the continuing chagrin of our globalist coastal elite who wish to wipe it out. The Electoral College and the quite antithetical makeup of the Senate and the House keep a Montana, Utah, or Wyoming from being politically neutered by California and New York. The idea, deemed outrageously “unfair” by academics and the media, is that a Wyoming rancher might have as much of a say in the direction of the country as thousands of more redundant city dwellers. Yet the classical idea of federal republicanism was to save democracy by not allowing 51 percent (of an increasingly urban population) to create laws on any given day at any given hour.

So the originalist theories of the Founders — nursed on classical tropes found in bucolic, pastoral, and agrarian romance, and on the skepticism of human nature conveyed throughout classical political philosophy — was that in a republic, real diversity is needed to offset sheer numbers. That is, rural voices, always to be in a minority, provided checks on the exuberance and occasional danger of the volatile cities, prone to fads that could devolve into hysteria and worse.

OBAMA SLAMS EVANGELICAL HISPANICS

Zachary Evans - Obama Claims Evangelical Latinos Disregarded Trump's Racism Because of View on 'Abortion,' 'Gay Marriage

Maybe Obama suffers from a bad conscience.   Giancarlo Sopo, the Trump campaign’s director of rapid response for Spanish media, disputed Obama’s claim.

“Our Hispanic advertising and communications largely focused on economic issues, public safety, Latin America, and socialism,” Sopo wrote in an email to National Review. “We never ran a single ad that even mentioned gay marriage, and while our surrogates did address abortion in media appearances, our only advertising on the topic was limited to a modest radio buy in New Mexico. ”

       Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), criticized Obama’s comments as “condescending.”

Ah yes, those Hispanic evangelicals. So backwards. Clinging to their guns and religion, you might say. Barack Obama still the most condescending corporate liberal in America https://t.co/IqUdbx5FB7     — Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) November 25, 2020

 Nick Arama also writes on Obama slaming evangelical Hispanics

        The article does well to quote Allie Beth Stuckey's reply:

Obama demeaning Hispanic evangelical voters for their marriage/abortion views is so classically Obama. Always presenting himself as the uniter while smugly condescending those who disagree with him. Give me Trump’s bombastic tweets over Obama’s smooth cruelty any day.   — Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) November 25, 2020