March 26, 2022

Let us not declare an end to societal disruption by governmental decree justified by COVID-19. Who can know what the CCP, CDC, WHO, or DNC (all looking so similar recently) will unleash upon us tomorrow? If it’s in their interest to wreak havoc, they will try — and may succeed.

That said, let’s declare an end to the First Wave of all that. It’s over. Everyone knows it — except, perhaps, New Yorkers and Californians, whose immersion in Marxism prevents cogent thought.

Looking back on two years of the Pandemic, which moments — which decisions, which deceptions, which outrages — merit the COVID Hall of Shame? It’s not an easy choice.

Candidate 1: The death sentence for nursing home patients.

It was known from the outset that COVID was most often fatal for elderly people in poor health. A locus of fatalities in March 2020 was a single nursing home in Washington State — it was right there on the Johns Hopkins website. Yet, Democrat governors Wolf, Cuomo, Witmer, Murphy, and Newsom ordered chronically-ill senior citizens with COVID discharged to nursing homes. The staff inevitably carried the illness to others during their normal course of duty. The only apt analogy is the distribution of smallpox-ridden blankets given to Native Americans by the British during the French and Indian War. In July 2020, the .7% of Pennsylvania’s population who were nursing-home residents accounted for 69% of COVID deaths there. 

This action by Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf and his colleagues can’t be chalked up to stupidity. Governors aren’t that stupid. To what end was it done? We cannot know. Wolf’s Secretary of Health Rachel Levine pulled her own mother from a nursing home, presumably to avoid a death sentence. Levine is now U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health and a four-star admiral. Good for her. Wolf remains governor. 

Candidate 2: Demonization of existing drugs that treat COVID

When some enterprising soul discovers an existing treatment for a new health threat, he or she usually becomes an overnight hero, especially when the treatment is safe, cheap, and widely available. When President Trump spoke of the promise of hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, the national media scoffed, because they considered Trump an ignoramus. When physicians who had prescribed hydroxychloroquine safely to prevent and treat malaria and chronic diseases for six decades championed its off-label use to treat a potentially fatal malady for which no other treatment existed, they were ostracized, and their medical licenses threatened. The hapless Neil Cavuto declared on Fox News: “this stuff will kill you.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. I know a medical professional who contracted COVID early on. She told me the hydroxychloroquine she took regularly for another illness saved her life. The drug proved effective in multiple studies when given early in the course of the disease, but its use was never adopted. Many died needlessly as a result.

The same is true of ivermectin, the “horse de-wormer,” whose inventors won the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine for creating the anti-parasitic drug — not for horses, but for humans (Human medications are routinely given to livestock). Why would an anti-parasitic prevent or treat COVID? We don’t know — but evidence shows it does. With no other treatment available, why wouldn’t off-label use of a safe, inexpensive drug be encouraged? Why ban its use and threaten colleagues who prescribed it? A loved one of mine survived COVID because of early intervention with ivermectin. She still feels the effects of a long bout with the disease, but she knew in two days she would beat it. (Her $15 prescription now costs $345.)

Candidate 3: Denial of natural immunity