Leftist Tyrants Exploit Shutdowns
It did not take long for leftist tyrants to exploit shutdown orders in mostly Democratic states. From Michigan to Kentucky to California and even to Texas, public officials are abusing their authority to infringe on fundamental rights of Americans.
The Democratic Governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, was promoted into office by the liberal media as a kinder, gentler alternative to his conservative predecessor, Matt Bevin. But as many on the right anticipated, Beshear is a tyrant in sheep’s clothing as he bullies the large evangelical community there.
Beshear declared that churchgoers on Easter Sunday would have their license plates recorded and be required to quarantine for daring to attend a service on that special day. This First Amendment-infringer then tweeted out a picture of his family enjoying the sunny day outside, illustrating his hypocrisy.
On Fire Christian Church sought and obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the City of Louisville to prohibit it from interfering with drive-in church services on Easter. The federal judge who issued this order in favor of religious liberty, Justin Walker, has been nominated by President Trump to the influential D.C. Circuit.
Another Democratic governor, whom the President calls “Half” Whitmer, has become a tyrant in Michigan. There, however, an intense backlash has initiated a recall petition drive which has already attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen “Half” Whitmer has gone so far as to order people to stay in their “main” home, which prohibits them from traveling to and taking care of their many cabins and cottages which line the Great Lakes of Michigan, Huron, and Superior. A state fond of boating and fishing has become a totalitarian society more like North Korea or Cuba.
In California, seven young people not expected to be vulnerable to the virus got together for some harmless drinks Saturday night in Santa Cruz and were slapped with tickets totaling $7,000 in fines. Further south, off Malibu, a man was arrested merely for using his paddle board far from anyone else.
Contrast all this with Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and her highly effective way of handling the Wuhan virus, which causes COVID-19. Governor Noem, like eight other Republican governors, has kept her state open throughout this crisis, relying on freedom and responsibility to combat the virus.
She announced that she has obtained one million doses of hydroxychloroquine for use by her residents, the medication that has been so effective in other countries and in certain locations in the United States in minimizing harm from the disease.
The media have pounced on governors like Noem who have kept their economies running, by printing stories that such policies result in “hot spots” like one supposedly breaking out in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Washington Post said that this “experience has been harrowing” because a total of 57 new COVID-19 cases recently arose there in one day among workers at a pork processing plant.
But what is “harrowing” is the interference by Democrats with early medication by hydroxychloroquine, an inexpensive, generic drug. More than 50,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19 were not allowed access to this medication for early treatment.
A nursing home in Democrat-controlled Washington State suffered 37 fatalities from COVID-19 without using the medication early to combat the disease. In contrast, a nursing home in Republican Texas which suffered a similar outbreak has welcomed and applied the medication, and has suffered only one fatality as reported by NPR.
Even the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has been pandering to the liberal media by imposing an overly broad shutdown of that warm-weather state, which has interfered with necessary medical care such as fixing broken bones or receiving hormonal treatments. Abbott hopes to run for president in 2024 but it is difficult to see why he thinks that shutting down Texas is good for anyone.
There is little money to be made in early treatment by generic medication or in herd immunity, and no political power to be gained by it. Democratic governors are emboldened by their newfound attention, and they are wrongly attempting to tell President Trump when to reopen the economy, not vice-versa.
Meanwhile, many hospitals are empty and workers have been furloughed due to the blocking of beneficial operations and treatment. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Tom Wolf’s shutdown order has caused the Lehigh Valley Health Network to furlough more than 900 staffers, resulting in the irony of empty hospitals due to overreaching by Democrats in dealing with a pandemic.
End the Economic Shutdown
Statewide lockdowns are not the way to fight the Chinese coronavirus. The vast majority of the counties, small towns and medium-sized cities across America are not at significant risk for COVID-19, and the millions of Americans who live there are needlessly suffering the consequences of an induced economic coma.
“Our people want to return to work,” Trump tweeted on March 24. “The cure cannot be worse (by far) than the problem!”
Widespread unemployment lasting more than a few weeks would be a social catastrophe far greater than even a worst-case scenario that might result from the coronavirus pandemic. Civil society breaks down quickly when ordinary people are prevented from earning a living, supporting their families, and paying their bills.
Yet a handful of big-city-dwelling governors have implemented a “one size fits all” approach by shutting down places of business which are not responsible for spreading the virus. In several states, regulators have even interfered with the use of hydroxychloroquine, the drug which shows great promise to prevent and treat this new disease.
New York Governor Cuomo could have focused his lockdown on the densely populated urban area where the coronavirus was actually spreading. Instead, he imposed a complete shutdown on every farm, village, township and county across the Empire State, in regions where residents are at low risk.
Illinois Governor Pritzker shut down his entire state to address an issue that primarily affects the Chicago area, even though 25 of the state’s 102 counties had yet to report a single case of the virus and most other counties were in the single digits. California Governor Newsom closed the vast interior of his state based on an outbreak in its coastal cities.
Pennsylvania is mostly open space, farms, forests, mountains and two big cities, yet its Democratic Governor Wolf closed all “non-life-sustaining businesses” across the entire state. He then ruled that stores selling guns and ammunition were “non-life-sustaining businesses,” although their thousands of customers obviously disagree.
On March 23 a divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the forced closing of a gun store, handing gun-grabbers a victory they could not have otherwise obtained. The court provided no explanation for upholding Pennsylvania’s sweeping shutdown of nearly every business there.
This misguided one-size-fits-all approach crippled our economy and torpedoed our stock market. Not even the largest federal stimulus in history can replace the private economies of our largest states.
Meanwhile, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exploited the crisis with a bill to impose a nationwide mandate for 15 days of early voting, which favors Democratic ballot harvesting by a political machine. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), who was instrumental in making Joe Biden the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, declared that the virus crisis is “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer delayed passage of the Republican stimulus bill in the Senate to give time for Pelosi to present her House version, which could alter elections for years to come. She introduced the 1,400-page Take Responsibility for Workers and Families Act, filled with pork including a multi-billion-dollar down payment on the Green New Deal.
Ironically, studies suggest that the oncoming warm weather may cause the coronavirus to subside, just as it has not spread so much in our warmer southern states or the southern hemisphere. Along with effective medical treatments, warmer weather could bring the crisis under control sooner, as President Trump predicts.
Anthony Fauci, a career bureaucrat who gushed in an email released by Wikileaks that a speech by Hillary Clinton once brought him to “tears” in support, misleadingly disparaged successful uses of the anti- malaria treatment as merely “anecdotal.” In fact, a French study supports use of that medication, and innovation with other safe medications should be encouraged.
Another leaked email reveals that Dr. Fauci was an enthusiastic admirer of Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she was running against Trump for president. It’s time to show Fauci the door and stop deferring to him.
In India, where U.S. drug makers have offshored much of their production, the government is arranging for its health care workers to receive the anti-malaria medication as a precaution. But in our country, pharmacy regulators in most states have mysteriously prohibited that salutary use.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi’s 1,400-page bill would have tilted future elections in her favor by mandating early voting, mail-in voting, ballot harvesting (which is ballot collection by paid activists), online voter registration, and no-excuse absentee ballots in every state. President Trump was right to speak against Pelosi’s bill and call for a quick end to economic shutdowns by Democratic governors.
Dems Push Socialized Medicine to Exploit Crisis
Filling hospital beds and then rationing care is the approach of socialized medicine, which has been a disaster in Italy. A far better approach is to allow physicians and pharmacists to provide early treatment for patients at home to address the Wuhan virus known as COVID-19.
If you are a television or Hollywood actor, then you receive the better treatment at home and no one will interfere with prescriptions by your physician. Daniel Dae Kim, an actor on “Lost” and “Hawaii Five-0,” credits receiving hydroxychloroquine for his recovery from COVID-19, while he avoided being hospitalized for it.
But Democratic governors from New York to Nevada are interfering with this potentially life-saving treatment for ordinary folk not yet hospitalized. Even in red-state Georgia, nursing home patients vulnerable to coronavirus are not able to receive this as a preventive measure, despite how it enabled South Korea to overcome the virus and how India encourages its use for at-risk health care workers.
The goal should be to keep people out of hospitals, and not wait until patients fill hospital beds before treating them. By the time a patient’s immune system is overwhelmed and he is hospitalized, it can be too late and he becomes a mechanism for diseases to spread to and from him.
But politics distorts, and we are merely months before voting begins in the presidential election. For Democrats, whatever Trump endorses is bad, and a prolonged crisis could boost the Democratic Party as the Great Depression did 90 years ago.
When Trump announced that hydroxychloroquine was a promising treatment for the Wuhan virus, he echoed what French researchers report and South Korean, Chinese and other authorities have recommended. But Democrats can never allow Trump to be proven right.
A board-certified physician who practices in New York’s Rockland and Orange counties, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, as of the end of March, treated 699 coronavirus patients with a treatment regimen using the same hydroxychloroquine tweeted by Trump. By giving this inexpensive medication early enough, Dr. Zelenko successfully kept 695 of his patients out of the hospital, and none of them has died.
But this means that Trump was right. Yet Democrats do the opposite, and the grandstanding Democratic New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, takes the hospitalize- and-ration approach of socialized medicine.
Cuomo has hoarded so much of the medication hydroxychloroquine that not even Dr. Zelenko’s patients can easily obtain it in New York anymore. Cuomo and other Democratic governors impede treatment for coronavirus patients until they get into a hospital, and then ration it.
Spending the last moments of one’s life in a warehouse of hospital beds is not what any patient wants. It brings us closer to the failed experiment of socialized medicine which caused such a high mortality rate in Italy, and has Canada panicked if the coronavirus becomes pervasive there.
The real crisis is one of politics, not medicine, as the effective treatment protocol is available and affordable. But due to politics Democrats are interfering with early medication of those who have been exposed to the sometimes deadly virus.
The Democratic Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, issued an order interfering with physicians’ early treatment of patients with hydroxychloroquine. Then she tried to blame Trump for not sending her enough equipment and supplies for Michigan’s hospitals.
Republican legislators including Annette Glenn pushed back on that tyranny, forcing Gov. Whitmer to issue a retraction. One patient in a Michigan hospital felt like he was near death before a physician finally prescribed the medication for him, and he then recovered quickly while criticizing his governor.
While blaming Trump, New York Gov. Cuomo demanded a massive stockpile of hydroxychloroquine but has since been hoarding it rather than allowing New Yorkers to obtain this medication to stay out of a hospital. The strategy of Democrats is not to cure people before they are hospitalized, but to control their care.
Socialized medicine withholds care and then earns political support by appearing to be generous with what the public should have access to all along. Patients should not have to beg politicians for access to medication hoarded in government stockpiles.
Meanwhile, Democrat governors have ordered a shutdown of activities they disfavor, while allowing daily activities frequented by their political allies. Abortion is improperly deemed “essential” while other elective surgery is curtailed, and “non-essential” services such as churches and gun stores are put on indefinite lockdown with pastors even being arrested.
Deadly Delay by Dr. Fauci
“You go to war with the army you have,” said President Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “Not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
Rumsfeld’s profound words have never been more important, as our nation has been called to war against an unseen enemy, the Chinese coronavirus. It’s time to summon and employ the resources we have today, not wait months or years for more studies, more data, and more proof that a promising medication is safe and effective.
President Trump, our commander-in-chief in the war against the virus, is a man of prompt and decisive action, and he takes pride in signing a “right to try” law in 2018. But he is being hamstrung by a Hillary Clinton-supporting federal bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci whose advice has stymied early, widespread use of hydroxychloroquine against the Wuhan virus.
Dr. Fauci is the George McClellan of the war on the coronavirus. General McClellan, the first commander of Union forces in the Civil War, had to be removed by President Lincoln when he persistently failed to engage the enemy.
Imagine if Fauci had been in charge of the decision to use the atom bomb in 1945. Atomic energy is an unproven technology, he might have exclaimed, while the Japanese continued to slaughter our soldiers, sailors and Marines in the Pacific theater of World War II.
Or think if Fauci had been General Douglas MacArthur’s aide-de-camp during the Korean War, when MacArthur proposed the daring Inchon landing maneuver which conquered the North Korean Army. We need more studies, Fauci might have said, before supporting the amphibious assault behind enemy lines.
Or what if Fauci had been advising General Washington about crossing the Delaware on December 25, 1776. The snow, the waves, the rickety boats, the shortage of proper clothes and shoes, the lack of good intelligence about the enemy camped on the other side — all these factors needed more study before Fauci could be 100% sure that Washington would succeed.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in his newly published pamphlet that Washington had read aloud to his troops before they boarded the boats on Christmas night. When the survival of your country is at risk and your soldiers are dying on the battlefield, there’s no more time for studies.
No medications have been thoroughly studied in time- consuming clinical trials for any new virus, including COVID-19. But we have solid evidence that a 65-year- old drug called hydroxychloroquine has helped many COVID-19 patients recover, and that it has also prevented many other people from getting the disease.
This medication is already being taken regularly by hundreds of thousands of Americans who suffer from lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. As far as anyone knows, no one has ever died from taking a recommended dose of the drug.
As America’s deaths from the virus exceeded 1,000 in a single day, there is no time for methodical studies to help another thousand COVID-19 patients who may die tomorrow. They should immediately be given the best medication available, whether exhaustively tested to Fauci’s satisfaction or not.
Karen Whitsett, a Michigan state representative, is one survivor who powerfully validates the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, which Dr. Fauci continues to disparage as unproven. A Democrat, she represents a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Detroit which has been ravaged by COVID-19.
When Whitsett arrived at the hospital with symptoms of the virus, she found that her own governor, a fellow Democrat named Gretchen Whitmer, had issued an order prohibiting the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients. Michigan was one of a number of states that have limited the use of the drug because so-called experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci claim it is unproven.
“I did have a difficult time, even that day, obtaining the medication because of an order that was put down in my state,” said Whitsett. “And it was on that day so you can imagine how terrified I was that I had to beg and plead and go through a whole lot to try to get the medication.”
Within hours of taking her first dose of hydroxychloroquine, Representative Whitsett was already feeling much better. “It has a lot to do with the president,” the lawmaker told the Detroit Free Press. “He is the only person who has the power to make it a priority.”
As Bob Dylan wrote, “how many deaths will it take ’till he knows that too many people have died?” Dr. Fauci should stop blowin’ in the wind.
