How to kill black people and be praised for it

Click for NYT article.

USA Today: Planned Parenthood founder tied to eugenics and racism

For those identifying historical figures with racist roots who should be removed from public view because of their evil histories, Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, must join that list. In promoting birth control, she advanced a controversial "Negro Project," wrote in her autobiography about speaking to a Ku Klux Klan group and advocated for a eugenics approach to breeding for “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.” ...

In a 1939 letter to Dr. C. J. Gamble, Sanger urged him to get over his reluctance to hire “a full time Negro physician” as the “colored Negroes…can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubt.”

Like the abortion lobby today, Sanger urged Dr. Gamble to enlist the help of spiritual leaders to justify their deadly work, writing, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” ...
 
Cultural icon Kanye West has made headlines with his recent statements on Planned Parenthoodabortion vendors, which he said have "been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.” He’s right about the locations of the businesses.

The vast majority of the abortion vendors have set up shop in minority neighborhoods, which can be seen in the scarce statistics available at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though they are only 13% of the female population, African Americans made up 38% of all abortions tracked in 2016.

If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

How deadly is the Wuhan virus really?

Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? -- Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude. 

Authors Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya "are professors of medicine at Stanford. Neeraj Sood contributed to this article."

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.

Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.

The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.

Population samples from China, Italy, Iceland and the U.S. provide relevant evidence. On or around Jan. 31, countries sent planes to evacuate citizens from Wuhan, China. When those planes landed, the passengers were tested for Covid-19 and quarantined. After 14 days, the percentage who tested positive was 0.9%. If this was the prevalence in the greater Wuhan area on Jan. 31, then, with a population of about 20 million, greater Wuhan had 178,000 infections, about 30-fold more than the number of reported cases. The fatality rate, then, would be at least 10-fold lower than estimates based on reported cases.

Next, the northeastern Italian town of Vò, near the provincial capital of Padua. On March 6, all 3,300 people of Vò were tested, and 90 were positive, a prevalence of 2.7%. Applying that prevalence to the whole province (population 955,000), which had 198 reported cases, suggests there were actually 26,000 infections at that time. That’s more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases. Since Italy’s case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%.

In Iceland, deCode Genetics is working with the government to perform widespread testing. In a sample of nearly 2,000 entirely asymptomatic people, researchers estimated disease prevalence of just over 1%. Iceland’s first case was reported on Feb. 28, weeks behind the U.S. It’s plausible that the proportion of the U.S. population that has been infected is double, triple or even 10 times as high as the estimates from Iceland. That also implies a dramatically lower fatality rate.

The best (albeit very weak) evidence in the U.S. comes from the National Basketball Association. Between March 11 and 19, a substantial number of NBA players and teams received testing. By March 19, 10 out of 450 rostered players were positive. Since not everyone was tested, that represents a lower bound on the prevalence of 2.2%. The NBA isn’t a representative population, and contact among players might have facilitated transmission. But if we extend that lower-bound assumption to cities with NBA teams (population 45 million), we get at least 990,000 infections in the U.S. The number of cases reported on March 19 in the U.S. was 13,677, more than 72-fold lower. These numbers imply a fatality rate from Covid-19 orders of magnitude smaller than it appears.

How can we reconcile these estimates with the epidemiological models? First, the test used to identify cases doesn’t catch people who were infected and recovered. Second, testing rates were woefully low for a long time and typically reserved for the severely ill. Together, these facts imply that the confirmed cases are likely orders of magnitude less than the true number of infections. Epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for these factors.

The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.

This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible.

If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions.

A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.

Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study -- New epidemiological model suggests the vast majority of people suffer little or no illness.

The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford.

If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

“We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now,” she said.

The modelling by Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group indicates that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January at the latest. Like many emerging infections, it spread invisibly for more than a month before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February.

The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta.

However, she was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.
The Oxford study is based on a what is known as a “susceptibility-infected-recovered model” of Covid-19, built up from case and death reports from the UK and Italy. The researchers made what they regard as the most plausible assumptions about the behaviour of the virus.

The modelling brings back into focus “herd immunity”, the idea that the virus will stop spreading when enough people have become resistant to it because they have already been infected. The government abandoned its unofficial herd immunity strategy — allowing controlled spread of infection — after its scientific advisers said this would swamp the National Health Service with critically ill patients.

But the Oxford results would mean the country had already acquired substantial herd immunity through the unrecognised spread of Covid-19 over more than two months. If the findings are confirmed by testing, then the current restrictions could be removed much sooner than ministers have indicated.

Although some experts have shed doubt on the strength and length of the human immune response to the virus, Prof Gupta said the emerging evidence made her confident that humanity would build up herd immunity against Covid-19.

To provide the necessary evidence, the Oxford group is working with colleagues at the Universities of Cambridge and Kent to start antibody testing on the general population as soon as possible, using specialised “neutralisation assays which provide reliable readout of protective immunity,” Prof Gupta said. They hope to start testing later this week and obtain preliminary results within a few days.

Stanford University School of Medicine seems to be casting a skeptical eye toward such claims. Example 1 - John Ioannidis, a professor there.

His expertise is wide-ranging—he juggles appointments in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists. He has published more than 1,000 papers, many of them meta-analyses—reviews of other studies. Yet he’s now found himself pilloried because he dissents from the theories behind the lockdowns—because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

Example 2: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (again) of Stanford Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya brings bad news:

1) Only a small percentage of Americans, less than one percent in his study, maybe two or three percent nationwide, have had COVID-19. Herd immunity requires something like 70 percent or 80 percent to have antibodies. So the disease has a very long way to go before it has run its course.

2) There is no vaccine for COVID-19 on the horizon, and there may never be one.

3) The shutdowns that have paralyzed the developed world have, to some degree, slowed the spread of the disease, at tremendous cost. But that only delays the inevitable. There will never be a time when it is “safe” to stop the lockdowns. The disease isn’t going away.

4) Dr. Bhattacharya is also eloquent in describing the disastrous human toll, in lives and misery, that the shutdowns have inflicted around the globe.

On the other hand, Dr. Bhattacharya has good news, too. The fatality rate from COVID-19 is low–worldwide, somewhere between 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent, probably closer to the low end of that range. The typical seasonal flu is said to have a fatality rate of around 0.1 percent. So COVID-19 is probably somewhat worse than the average flu virus.

Here is the video in which he makes those points.

They really do think this way

This is one reason the stakes are so high this November. The Left really does think this way.

I erased the middle letters of the f-word. As someone commented at the post, it seems obvious that not only have the shutdowns been far more severe than they needed to be, even some on the Left are starting to understand that there is no medical justification for continuing them. But that means that Democrat politicians such as Governors Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer will no longer be able to rule by diktat and the power of the statists will lessen. That is unacceptable.

So the pivot: it does not matter that the shutdowns are not medically necessary. We find them politically desirable because we know never to let a crisis go to waste.

So let's try this:

If a medically-informed response to a pandemic creates economic hardship so serious that the economic impacts are more deadly than the virus, you change your

idea of what "medically-informed" really means when it kills more people than it saves, you Communist totalitarian murderer.

But we could tell that Dusti Sage, whoever she is, was really serious and very insightful because she used the f-word. That is reserved for only the highest levels of discussion among the self-anointed elite.

Update: When Dusti Sage speaks of the destruction of the economy, with permanent effects, everyone needs to understand that destruction of the existing economy is a longstanding goal of the Left. Covid is their excuse, not their reason. They do not need a reason, just an opportunity.

That "This is not a natural disaster, but a manmade one" is a distinction of no relevance.

"I try to get more cynical every day . . .

" ... but I can't keep up." So observed Gerard Vanderleun a few years ago on the state of American politics. But it is not just politics any more. Consider this FB post, which I have personally verified (I deleted the person's name).

Now, why is that the rule? Having been a federal bureaucrat, I will say (in my view, authoritatively) that there is one and only one reason: money.

Understand that this listing decision was not originated by physicians, but by administrators. And the overwhelming desire of every bureaucratic administrator everywhere is this: get more money. Increase his/her department's budget.  Because that is the way that bureaucrats get promoted - not for managing programs or people, but by managing ever-larger budgets.

And the medical bureaucrats know very well that the amount of money they get from  the federal spigots turned on for the C19 epidemic will relate very directly to the number of C19 cases they report, especially the fatalities.

If you think this sounds cynical, I assure you: It is far from cynical enough.

Update: And the beat goes on:

The Big Apple’s new death toll is 10,367. That figures combines the 6,589 victims who tested positive for the virus plus another 3,778  who were never tested, but whose death certificates list the cause of death as “COVID-19 or an equivalent,” according to city Health Department data from March 11 through April 13.

Italics mine, to illuminate what is being done here. What exactly is an "equivalent" cause of death to C19? Why, something that killed them, duh. You know, like lung cancer.

I said on my FB page, "First, let’s kill the children."

 Serious question: How many people are we willing to kill to stop people from dying of Covid-19?  

More specifically: How many children are we willing to kill to do it? Read this and weep:

"Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday. ...

But the U.N. report warned that “economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in an hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality within a single year.”

The full UN report is here.

Our sanguinary calculus is real: If we do not do lockdown/distancing by shutting down the economy, people will die. And if we do lockdown/distancing by shutting down the economy, people will still die - and the UN says that "hundreds of thousands" of them will be children. But as Roger Kimball explains,

We have often been presented with a false dichotomy between saving the economy and saving lives. This is a false dichotomy because, as Geach points out, “the state of our economy is not just a monetary risk, it is a health risk.” For one thing, “when people lose their jobs, they typically lose their health insurance.” He notes that there were more than 10,000 “economic suicides” as a result of the 2008 recession. There is also a spike in cancer deaths, drug abuse, domestic violence, and other pathologies.

This is not a guess, it is fact:

Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

There are protests around the country against long continuing the restrictions from this day on. The longer we are told to stay "safe at home" instead of going back to work, or finding a new job for the 22 million-plus Americans who have lost theirs in the last month, the more people will kill themselves or a family member, the more spouses and children will suffer abuse and injury, the more alcoholics will be made, the more people will suffer fatal non-Covid illnesses, the more drug addicts will be made - the list continues.

"At some point," [Princeton bioethicist] Peter Singer says, "we are willing to trade off loss of life against loss of quality of life. No government puts every dollar it spends into saving lives. And we can't really keep everything locked down until there won't be any more deaths.

We need to think about this in the context of the well-being of the community as a whole….We are currently impoverishing the economy, which means we are reducing our capacity in the long term to provide exactly those things that people are talking about that we need—better health care services, better social-security arrangements to make sure that people aren't in poverty. There are victims in the future, after the pandemic, who will bear these costs. The economic costs we incur now will spill over, in terms of loss of lives, loss of quality of life, and loss of well-being.

I think that we're losing sight of the extent to which that's already happening. And we need to really consider that tradeoff.

 The "false debate," in other words, is not the discussion that considers the enormous human cost of suppressing economic activity. It's the discussion that pretends there is no such tradeoff. (The 'False Debate' About Reopening the Economy Is the One That Ignores the Enormous Human Cost of Sweeping COVID-19 Control Measures)

And it will not take long for the American people justifiably to decide that the real point of these restrictions is not the health of Americans at all, but something politically sinister. And no podium appearances by Dr. Fauci or Dr. Birx is going to persuade them otherwise.

Covid-19 is not the zombie apocalypse!

This is a zombie:

A zombie is actually dead, it is just too stupid to know it. And all it wants to do is find you, a non-zombie, and bite big chunks of flesh from your body. This turns you into a zombie, too.

Key point: Zombies are very bad! Avoid zombies, even if it means staying holed up in your house, never leaving, stocked with 500 rolls of toilet paper and all the hand sanitizer you can buy!

However, this is a Covid-19 sufferer:

Please note the difference. Covid-19 patients do not attack you. They do not eat your living tissue. They are not dead, like zombies are. The great majority of them recover and the ones who do not are too sick before death to track you down and infect you, even if they wanted to. Which they do not.

Key point: It's time to stop treating social distancing like prepping for a zombie apocalypse. 

Even as Covid worsens in America - and it will - it will not cause the collapse of our civilization. Workers will still work, although many businesses and industries will take a hit. Farmers will still farm. Ninety percent of the toilet paper we use is made right here in the USA. Almost all the other 10 percent comes from Canada and Mexico.

Social distancing does not mean you can never leave your house. It does not mean that you will become infected by walking down the street. Even if you are at high-risk for the infection, it does not mean you must now stockpile 500 rolls of toilet paper and all the hand sanitizer you can get.

We are not going to run out of hand sanitizer or toilet paper. Or food. And even if you do not want to risk going to a (potentially) crowded store to buy more, someone else will go for you. Ask a family member, neighbor, friend. Ask a local church or synagogue for help.

There was never a reason for this to have occurred across the country:

In a week or so, those who did this are going to wonder why. And people who bought cases and cases of vegetables, two-dozen pounds of chicken or beef will wind up throwing a lot away, spoiled.

Buying as if there is going to be a shortage is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is what creates the shortage.

So chill, Americans. Just chill. Take all the proper precautions against the virus. But nothing about this disease requires stockpiling. Face the future with confidence and planning, not panic. We simply are not at this point, not by a long shot:


Don't let us get there for no reason other than we act like it.

Update: Found on FB:

Covid-19, from a reliable source

I received this from a man, Ken, I have known for many years. He is a retired Master Sergeant of the Tennessee Army National Guard. Since retirement he has been a senior director of emergency management in Tennessee. He said he got this "From a reliable friend in the medical field." Well, I trust Ken.

Here is the man's assessment.
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The virus is encircled by an oily, lipid layer that dissolved on contact with soap. Hence the push for hand washing. The virus enters the body through the mouth, nose, and/or eyes and needs cells with ACE2 receptors to attach. These are found primarily in the heart and lungs. ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme) is a protein associated with both diabetes and HTN, both conditions which place an individual at a heightened risk; 40% of patients with HTN experienced severe infections.

The virus then attaches to healthy cells with that fatty, oily layer and hijacks the cells, making proteins to keep the immune system at bay. The immune system mounts a defense and sometimes attacks healthy lung cells. The lungs fill with fluid and dying cells. This can lead to ARDS which is most often fatal, basically an acute, lethal pneumonia. That's what killing people. It's not unlike the Spanish Flu. That flu attacked healthy individuals and created a "cytokine storm" and people drowned from the fluids in their lungs. We now know the virus is found in the bloodstream, GI tract, CNS, and possibly brain. It can cause damage to the lungs, heart, bone marrow, and liver, possibly nerve cells. Should you survive a severe infection because you're young and healthy, you can expect a 20-30% decrease in lung capacity. What this means is that a flight of stairs will wind you. You can expect lung scarring and damage. We do not know the long term effects as this is an entirely new virus. When a virus makes that first jump from one species to another, it is at its most lethal. That is what we are seeing with SARS-CoV-2.

A new study is out that shows the droplets can "hang" in the air for up to three hours. This may mean the virus is aerosolized which answers the question why it appears to be so contagious when it only has an R0 of 2.4. This study was conducted by NIH, Princeton and UCLA and is not yet peer reviewed. This study also showed the virus is viable on plastics for 3 days; on the glass of cell phones 9 days; and on cardboard for 24 hours.

Contrary to the other four coronaviruses that are endemic in our population, this one does not seem to be susceptible to heat and humidity as we had first hoped. The transmission of the virus will go down come summer, but that is a function of schools' closing for the summer break rather than a response to heat/humidity. There will be an uptick in cases once fall arrives due to the close quarters. This virus is not going away anytime soon. There are three courses a novel virus can take - 1. It can appear, be devastating, and disappear unexpectedly like both SARS and MERS. This one did not do that so this option is out. 2. It can cause a global pandemic and a lot of people will lose their lives or be disabled from the infection. May be happening. 3. It can become endemic in our population like the other 4 coronaviruses we see during cold and flu season and account for up to 30% of our "colds." This is highly likely.

Myths:

1. Keep your mouth moist (another version is to spray your nose with saline) and the virus can't "take hold." Staying hydrated helps your immune system. It does not do anything to the virus.

2. Keep your mouth moist and take sips frequently to "swallow the virus."

3. Drink a solution of diluted bleach and water. No. Do not ever drink bleach. Or take acetic acid or any number of the "natural cures" out there. If there was a natural cure, doubtful almost 6k people globally would have died.

4. Take vitamin C. Vitamin C was a great marketing campaign in the 50s by Linus Pauling. It's such a great campaign, it perpetuates today. It does absolutely nothing for the prevention or treatment of colds/viruses.

5. There are antibiotics for this virus. Antibiotics only work on bacterial infections. We don't know which, if any, antivirals work on this novel virus.

6. I'm young and healthy. If I get it, it won't affect me. There can be long term damage or even organ failure due to the virus. We will not know for many years the extent of the damage.

7. The flu shot will prevent the virus. The flu and this virus are completely different viruses. However, getting the flu shot does two things: decreases your chances of becoming ill from the flu and having a weakened immune system making you more susceptible to the coronavirus and keeps you out of the hospitals allowing providers the time and resources to care for victims of the pandemic.

8. Black people don't get the coronavirus. OMG. NO! This is not only racist, it's completely wrong. Africa has over 100 cases.

9. I should wear a mask. No. Just no. (I can elaborate at length why this is not a good idea)

10. Kids can't get the virus. Not only is this not true, it may be deadly. Yes, children can get the virus and many are asymptomatic. So far, thankfully, there haven't been any deaths in children under 9. Newborns have gotten the virus. We just don't know what the long term effects will be. If you can protect your children, do so.

11. Schools are closed; I can take my child to the museum, zoo, theater, etc. NO. The idea of social distancing is to stay home. Do just that. Stay home. If you do not, people will die. It's that simple.

12. Heat (or cold) will kill the virus. Nope. This nasty bugger is strong and kicking our butts. Neither a hot or cold bath or a hair dryer will kill the virus. (Seriously, WHO, who is using a hair dryer to kill the virus??)

13. Garlic. What? No, of course garlic doesn't prevent or treat the virus. I mean, look at Italy.

14. There are medicines to treat the virus. No, there are no specific meds to treat this virus. South Korea seems to have found a sweet spot with a combo of drugs, but we have no idea if that actually works, how effective it is, long term effects, etc. We are years away from a vaccine.

15. Essential oils. No. Always no.

And the big one - 16. "It's just the flu." Nope. At the worst, its 30x more fatal than the seasonal flu (Chinese/WHO figures) at its best, 10x more fatal (South Korea figures). This is NOT just the flu. Seasonal flu has a case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.6% annually. This virus, depending on which country you run the stats has either a 3.4% CFR or a 1.2% CFR. Both are substantially higher than the flu. For comparison, the Spanish Flu had a CFR of 2.5%.
-----------

Read this, too: Influenza kills more people than coronavirus so everyone is overreacting, right? Wrong — and here’s why

Folks, this virus is bad news. Treat it that way.

Why health care is not a human right

I first wrote this in 2009, but it seems relevant to today as well; I have updated it.

Is health care a human right, as the United Methodist Church says? I don't see how. Human rights, as Americans have always understood them (beginning with Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders) are a fact of nature that cannot be rescinded by human beings. Rights are immutable, indeed, unalienable ("Not to be separated, given away, or taken away" Dictionary.com, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.)  As a precursor to his Declaration theology that unalienable human rights are a endowment by God, Jefferson wrote in his pre-revolution essay, Summary View of the Rights of British America, " The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may disjoin, but cannot destroy them."

Since his day, and certainly preceding it, the historic American understanding of human rights is the exercise of individual freedom, especially in the political realm, for both public and personal good. We have historically never understood our rights as encompassing access to services or commodities.

Rights are inherent in each individual equally, they are not divisible. Take the Declaration's famous insistence that among human rights is "the pursuit of happiness." Note that it is the pursuit of happiness that is a right, not the achievement of it. Nor is one person more entitled to pursue happiness than another, no matter one’s station in life. Besides, happiness (what Jefferson meant was not happiness as we use the word today, but a state of contentment in life and possessions) is not something that can be given us, it is something we have to create.

It does sound all high-minded to say that, like rights, health care should be equal for everybody, which I suppose is why clergy are so susceptible to say so. It's more than obvious that no one in the Congress or the White House believed it in 2009 when Obamacare was enacted. If they had, the act would have required members of Congress and the rest of the federal government to fall under the "public option" along with the rest of us proles. But they’ve protected their turf completely and much better turf is theirs than ours. I’ll believe that equal access and care for everyone is a moral imperative when the people who say it is a moral imperative place themselves under the same imperative.

The presumption that health care is a right, and therefore must be equal for everyone, is founded on two critical errors of understanding. The first is that health care is a resource that is simply available for those who need it, or that can be made equally available through proper legislation and regulation. The second error is that medical care and access to it can be rationed by command more equally, economically, and fairly than by demand.

Health care is not a resource to be exploited

Medical facilities and doctors are not phenomena of nature, like water or petroleum are. Hospitals don’t just appear. They are produced. Medical care is not a resource that can be "mined" through more regulation to be more plentiful. Medical care is a service. 

Specifically, it is a contracted service, in much the same way that legal assistance, automotive maintenance or pastoral care are services. Why? Because men and women choose of their own accord to get medical training. Once graduated, doctors, nurses, paramedics and technicians of various kinds reasonably expect that they will be compensated at a rate greater than their costs to enter the profession, greater than their extremely high overhead to run the practice, and enough to make their grueling hours materially worthwhile for themselves and their families.

This fact has very direct consequences under the Medicare and Medicaid systems we have today. The Atlantic's business journalist Meg McArdle explains:

[W]e have a comprehensive national health care plan for seniors. Yet we have a shortage of geriatricians, the one specialty that you would think would be booming. Why? Because Medicare sets a single price for the services of geriatricians, and it is low. Since the field is not particularly enticing (though arguably it really should be, since geriatricians have extremely high job satisfaction compared to many more popular specialties), very few people go into it. It's one of relatively few specialties that consistently has most of its slots and fellowships unfilled.

Moreover, the skills and equipment a doctor or hospital possess are their individual property, not the property, even partially, of the state or public. (There are publicly-owned facilities such as VA hospitals, but in operation there is no difference to the general public between them and private facilities). No one has a natural right to someone else's property. To think we do directly violates the Tenth Commandment. As McArdle says, "People have no obligation to perform labor for others. I may not [justly or legally] force a surgeon to save my mother at gunpoint."

That means that to receive a doctor's services, the doctor and a patient must come to a mutually-agreeable arrangement of what medical care will be provided in exchange for a specified fee. This is a commercial transaction no different in type than hiring a plumber, cab driver or lawyer. That medical services may be life critical does not change the fundamental nature of the contract.

We have access to medical care only as long as a doctor is willing to provide it. No one has to become a doctor or continue in medical practice. If any "reform" of the present health care system reduces the rewards of practicing medicine or complicates the practice, fewer men and women will so choose, as in Britain today (see below). Access will then go down for everyone and costs will inevitably rise, no matter what the rate-payment of the public option is, because access or its lack is itself a cost and also drives other costs.

Health care is a service

As Michael Keehn explains, health care is a service but not a community service. Police and fire departments provide community services. That seems obvious enough, but consider: fire departments do not protect your home individually. The fire chief definitely will let it burn to the ground if firefighting needs are greater elsewhere in the town. Just look at what is happening near Los Angeles as of the date of this post. Police and fire protection are in fact rationed to protect the lives and property of the greatest number of people possible with the resources available. But when the resources (manpower, equipment or money) run out, individuals are exposed to greater danger or loss though the community at large may still be protected.

Individual residents of a city do not contract for their community’s police or fire protection. When you call 9-1-1 because someone broke into your home while you were in bed, you don’t have to sign a contract with the police when they arrive, specifying the actions you want them to take and how much you are going to pay.

In contrast, medical care is an individual service. Doctors do not provide their services to the community as a whole, but to individuals. Because of that, each patient enters into a contract with his/her doctor specifying the medical services to be received and how much it will cost. This is mostly mediated through insurance companies, of course, which greatly simplifies the contracting process. The result is that a patient 's health is protected in a way that their safety or homes are not protected by the police or fire departments.

Interestingly, the Roman Catholic Church rejects the idea that health care is a human right. The Most Reverend R. Walker Nickless, bishop of the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa, explains.

[T]he Catholic Church does not teach that “health care” as such, without distinction, is a natural right.

The “natural right” of health care is the divine bounty of food, water, and air without which all of us quickly die. This bounty comes from God directly. None of us own it, and none of us can morally withhold it from others. The remainder of health care is a political, not a natural, right, because it comes from our human efforts, creativity, and compassion.

Like any human endeavor, health care is finite. It can be properly understood only as such. Any reform that treats medical care as if it can be made infinitely available is a product of cloud-cuckoo land. Medical care, like every other finite thing, must be allocated. The current buzzword for that is "rationed." That’s the foundation of the second critical mistake people are making about health care, that medical care and access to it can be rationed by the government more equally, economically and fairly than by consumers. 

Philip Barlow, Consultant neurosurgeon at Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, explains why "Health care is not a human right." 

Update, March 2020: In 2009. Philip Niles wrote that the real question is not whether health care is a human right, but "How much health care is a human right?" His essay is no no longer online. It is a good question because since medical care is finite. He says, 

With all of the emotional and financial investment in health care, it is important to address the situation with an actionable approach - not an ideologic one.  My suggestion is to quantify just HOW MUCH health care we believe is "right" to provide, recognize that we should cap public health care spending, and focus the moral/fiscal debate on how high that cap should be set.  Let's achieve our ambitions of providing access for the uninsured with the most likely way of succeeding: by haggling about the price.

There is always a price to be paid, one way or another. What politicians seeking votes seem to do is ignore that price (paid by the consumer) and cost (borne by the provider) are not the same. When a political candidate promises free health care for everyone, they conveniently ignore that free care is simply, literally impossible. 

Look at it this way: as I write, we are in the midst of the coronavirus concerns, with a few thousand died from it worldwide and several in the US, where cases are rising. Now imagine you are a government-employee administrator for Medicare For All the next time such a potential pandemic arises -- and most assuredly there will be a next time. 

You have to choose between funding two heart-replacement surgeries plus rehab routines or funding the testing of 50,000 potential virus infectees for the illness. You do not have the funds to do both. 

Which do you choose? Why? And how do you respond when the untreated persons demand it anyway because it is a human right? 

There is always this question: Who pays and in what coin? One candidate this year had either the temerity (or carelessness) to tell his audience the day before the S.C. primary, "Your taxes are going to be raised" to pay for Medicare For All. How much will taxes be raised? He did not say, but presumably they will raised an amount corresponding to the cost of providing the medical care to the population. In other words, everyone will still pay an insurance premium now called taxes, and the tax rate will never go anywhere but up. Why? Because every other nation with "free" health care finds it over-utilized and under-resourced. 

Take Canada, for example, which many politicos say can be a model for us. In reality ...

... Canadians' out-of-pocket health costs are nearly identical to what Americans pay—a difference of roughly $15 per month. In return, Canadians pay up to 50% more in taxes than Americans, with government health costs alone accounting for $9,000 in additional taxes per year. This comes to roughly $50 in additional taxes per dollar saved in out-of-pocket costs.  Keep in mind these are only the beginning of the financial hit from "Medicare for All." 

Canada's public system does not cover many large health costs, from pharmaceuticals to nursing homes to dental and vision. As a result, public health spending in Canada accounts for only 70% of total health spending. In contrast, Medicare for All proposals promise 100% coverage. This suggests the financial burdens on Americans, and distortions to care, would be far greater than what Canadians already suffer. ...  

More serious than the financial burdens is what happens to quality of care in a government-run system. Canada's total health costs are about one-third cheaper than the U.S. as a percent of GDP, but this is achieved by undesirable cost-control practices. For example, care is ruthlessly rationed, with waiting lists running into months or years. The system also cuts corners by using older and cheaper drugs and skimping on modern equipment. Canada today has fewer MRI units per capita than Turkey or Latvia. 

Moreover, underinvestment in facilities and staff has reached the point where Canadians are being treated in hospital hallways. Predictably, Canada's emergency rooms are packed. In the province of Quebec, wait-times average over four hours, leading many patients to just give up, go home and hope for the best.

The piper must always be paid. And so it shall be for us, but both in currency and in other than money. Medical care is always rationed. Always. And the rationing takes place within three areas:

1. Price to the consumer, presently mediated through 
1. insurance premiums and co-pays, and
2. Medicare and co-pays and Medicaid.
3. Under MFA, those will be taxes and the Dept. of Health and Human Services.
    
2. Quality of the care provided, mediated through 
1. the training of the physicians, nurses, and other medical staff
2. the quality and availability of medical supplies and equipment.
3. costs of the providers as related to price to the consumers.
    
3. Availability of the care, mediated 
1. always through the number of practitioners and where they work, and that is almost always mediated through compensation,
2. and by what medical specialties they practice, noting that this is heavily related to compensation also (see Megan McArdles' observation above). 
3. by limiting or even eliminating medical for some demographics, say by age, as now-suspended presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg said explicitly.

What we are falling into in this debate is the "Do something!" fallacy: 

1. The status quo is deficient, so something must be done!
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, this must be done. 

Absolutely anything can be justified by that template - and is being justified. But remember: medical care is always rationed, either by price and cost, or by quality, or by availability. When we go to the polls in November, we will not be voting for free health care for everyone. We will be voting only for how we want health care rationed in the coming years, and we will be merely hoping without any evidence anywhere in the world that it will be better than what we have now. 
  

Finally, The New York Times in 2009: "Why We Must Ration Health Care."

Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another. In the United States, most health care is privately financed, and so most rationing is by price: you get what you, or your employer, can afford to insure you for. But our current system of employer-financed health insurance exists only because the federal government encouraged it by making the premiums tax deductible. That is, in effect, a more than $200 billion government subsidy for health care. In the public sector, primarily Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits, high patient copayment requirements, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients and limits on payments to hospitals.

The case for explicit health care rationing in the United States starts with the difficulty of thinking of any other way in which we can continue to provide adequate health care to people on Medicaid and Medicare, let alone extend coverage to those who do not now have it.

This is not where are now except for the VA. Which should tell us something.

Forbes covered the way health care works (well, doesn't work) in Britain: "Britain's Version Of 'Medicare For All' Is Struggling With Long Waits For Care."

Consider how long it takes to get care at the emergency room in Britain. Government data show that hospitals in England only saw 84.2% of patients within four hours in February. That's well below the country's goal of treating 95% of patients within four hours -- a target the NHS hasn't hit since 2015. Now, instead of cutting wait times, the NHS is looking to scrap the goal. ...  

The NHS also routinely denies patients access to treatment. More than half of NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, which plan and commission health services within their local regions, are rationing cataract surgery. They call it a procedure of "limited clinical value." It's hard to see how a surgery that can prevent blindness is of limited clinical value. Delaying surgery can cause patients' vision to worsen -- and thus put them at risk of falls or being unable to conduct basic daily activities.  

"It's shocking that access to this life-changing surgery is being unnecessarily restricted," said Helen Lee, a health policy manager at the Royal National Institute of Blind People.  

Many Clinical Commissioning Groups are also rationing hip and knee replacements, glucose monitors for diabetes patients, and hernia surgery by placing the same "limited clinical value" label on them. Patients face long wait times and rationing of care in part because the NHS can't attract nearly enough medical professionals to meet demand. At the end of 2018, more than 39,000 nursing spots were unfilled. That's a vacancy rate of more than 10%. Among medical staff, nearly 9,000 posts were unoccupied.

But don't worry. We will be promised that we will do it different. But there is zero reason to believe that American politicians and bureaucrats are magically more generous, more compassionate or smarter than Britain's. 

Or for that matter, Canada's, where the government determines medical care, and so uses that power to favor selected constituencies. In Canada, rare but expensive medical treatments go grossly underfunded while the government spends enormous sums on cheap treatments and meds that vast numbers of voters use. Like this:

A girl who died of leukemia was given a final send off after her friends signed her casket with loving messages on January 30.  

[…]Laura might have experienced a few more milestones if a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, hospital had been able to accommodate a bone marrow transplant for the young woman. Numerous donors were a match with Laura and ready to donate, but Hamilton’s Juravinski Hospital didn’t have enough beds in high-air-pressure rooms for the procedure. Hospital staff told her they had about 30 patients with potential donors, but the means to only do about five transplants a month.  

[…]Dr. Ralph Meyer, Juravinski’s vice-president of oncology and palliative care, told Ontario’s TheStar.com there are plenty of others facing the same situation as Laura in Canada.

Free birth control immediately? Check. Free needles to inject illegal narcotics? Check. Free condoms? Check. Free abortions on demand? Check. Life-saving operation for a single leukemia patient? Not a chance. Leukemia patients are too few to form a voting block, so let 'em die. 

Then there is the Catholic-run hospice in Canada that the government is requiring closure because it refuses to kill its patients. 

A hospice in Canada has lost its funding and is being forced to close after refusing to offer and perform medically assisted suicides. The Irene Thomas Hospice in Delta, British Columbia, will lose $1.5 million in funding and will no longer be permitted to operate as a hospice as of February 25, 2021. 

Fraser Health Authority, one of the six public health care authorities in the province, announced on Tuesday that it would be ending its relationship with the hospice over its refusal to provide medically assisted deaths to its patients.

Anyone who thinks that none of this can happen under Medicare For All is living on a different planet than the rest of us. The only way the Democrat party thinks of goods and services is by in-groups and out-groups. And that is where they will allocate funds, spending bite-size on as many people as they can, because the real purpose of Medicare For All is not medical care. It is to enhance and keep political power. 

Enlaces para pensar - 2 de septiembre

Socialist medicine will work great! Just look at the VA! When my liberal friends tell me that government-controlled medical care is unarguably the best America could ever get, I always reply, "So show me. Fix the VA and when it is running just like you want Medicare for All to work, tell me and I will take you more seriously." Then they get mad at me.

Well, here ya go: Officials are investigating 11 suspicious deaths at a VA hospital. Two have been ruled homicides.

But wait! There's more! Horror: VA Failed To Stop Pathologist Who Misdiagnosed Thousands — And Showed Up Drunk For Work

My point is not that stuff like this never happens in our current, private hospitals. It is that government bureaucrats always protect their own, and when the medical staff becomes, basically, another group of bureaucrats, then you get more of that code of omerta, and it is protected by the bureaucracy. Remember 2015's Gold King Mine Spill, caused exclusively by federal EPA employees? How many federal bureaucrats got fired or disciplined for it? Zero.

Stanford University makes segregation official policy. Stanford pushes separate physics course for minority students

• In an effort to achieve “diversity” within its physics department, Stanford University is offering a separate physics course in order to ensure retention of “underrepresented” physics majors.
• The initiative also includes two other physics courses focusing entirely on “diversity” and “inclusion” within the discipline.

The second bullet means that the "two other physics courses" are not actually physics courses. They are political courses. Stanford says as much:

Other courses offered to bridge the supposed diversity problem at Stanford include two one-unit physics courses that address not physics itself, but rather concepts of diversity within the discipline.

But they will count toward fulfilling a physics major, you betcha. In fact, they will soon be required for a B.S. in physics if they are not already.

Science courses used to be about, well, science. Now, like everything else the Left touches, they are increasing about political indoctrination. Not even the Soviet Union went that far.

How long will it be until you board an airliner designed by engineers whose major in aeronautical engineering had a principal focus on diversity and inclusion in engineering? Good luck with that!

"Religion is a check on moral relativism, so naturally the left hates it." Well, Left-wing politics is a religion and it does not tolerate competition. Like this: WBAP Morning News: Beto Supporters Boo Man Who Said America Needs to ‘Return to Jesus’

At a recent Town Hall event, Beto O’Rourke supporters booed a man who told the crowd that America needs to “return to Jesus” in order to heal. 

You will need counseling after clicking this link: Truly awful, idiotic, and just plain inexplicable but real kitchens in real houses. Don't say I didn't warn you. 

And then there are the living rooms. Living Room Design Fails So Bad, They'll Scare the Living Daylights Out of You

Love that it is for sale for more than one million dollars.

Shooting down drones is now easy. Well, for now. New military system could aloows soldiers to eliminate drones with one shot

With the system, the user selects and locks onto the target, and as soon as the trigger is squeezed, the system calculates the target’s movement and predicts its next location by means of advanced image processing and algorithms. SMASH 2000 prevents the bullet being fired until the target is precisely in its crosshairs.

It is also being tested by US armed forces.

"Senegal was not a hellhole." What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

Take something as basic as family.  Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins.  All the men in one generation were called "father."  Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives.  Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty.  (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)  Sex, I was told, did not include kissing.  Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas.  Fidelity was not a thing.  Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death.  Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives.  Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown.  The value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.

Read the whole thing.

Have a great Labor Day! Even though This Labor Day, Unions Are Gunning for Workers' Free Speech Rights