2009, A Refresher Course on Sheriff Joe Biden and the Stimulus Fraud

Posted on September 28, 2020September 28, 2020 by Denise Simon

February 23, 2009

President Barack Obama announced Vice President Joe Biden will oversee the Administration’s implementation of the Recovery Act’s provisions and the appointment of Earl Devaney as Chair of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board in a meeting with the Nation’s Governors this morning. The Vice President will meet regularly with key members of the Cabinet, Governors and Mayors to make sure their efforts are speedy and effective. He will also make regular, public reports to the President on implementation and those will be posted on Recovery.gov. The Chair of the Transparency and Accountability Board Earl Devaney will report to the Vice President.

“Beginning this week, Vice President Biden will meet regularly with key members of my cabinet to make sure our efforts are not just swift, but efficient and effective. He’ll also work closely with our nation’s Governors, and our Mayors, and everyone else involved in this effort, to keep things on track. The fact that I am asking the Vice President to personally lead this effort shows how important it is for our country and our future to get this right, and I thank him for his willingness to take on this critical task,” President Obama told a group of Governors this morning. “I am also proud to announce the appointment of Earl Devaney as Chair of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board. For nearly a decade as Inspector General at the Interior Department, Earl has doggedly pursued waste, fraud and mismanagement, and Joe and I can’t think of a more tenacious and efficient guardian of the hard-earned tax dollars the American people have entrusted us to wisely invest.”

$800 BILLION

Missing in Action: Stimulus Sheriff Joe Biden

***

Then in 2011 as reported:

The Congressional Budget Office says the stimulus package will cost $43 billion more than estimated. The stimulus package is full of waste, fraud, and abuse. As Michelle Malkin notes:

Last week, the Treasury Department inspector general found that the tax police have failed to prevent fraud in the stimulus law’s energy tax credit program. Some $6 billion in stimulus energy credits for homeowners have been claimed — but the inspector general’s audit found that 30 percent of credit-claimers had no record of homeownership. The recipients included prisoners and minors. “I am troubled by the IRS’s continued failure to develop appropriate verification methods for distributing Recovery Act credits,” the Treasury Inspector watchdog said. Moreover, when the IRS wasn’t falling down on its job policing outside fraud, its own workers were committing their own stimulus fraud — by cheating the system and claiming a first-time homebuyer tax credit included in the 2008 and 2009 economic stimulus packages. At least 128 IRS employees claimed the credit, according to a recent Treasury Department audit, yet weren’t first-time buyers or violated other basic eligibility criteria.

Moreover, the stimulus package has also “redistributed wealth to prison inmates, flaky researchers, social justice boondoggles, infrastructure to nowhere, foreign companies, dead people and ghost congressional districts — not to mention $20 million in chump change to pay for campaign-style stimulus-hyping road signs across the country emblazoned with the shovel-ready logo.” Only a small fraction of the stimulus package went to infrastructure spending, and maintenance-of-effort provisions elsewhere in the stimulus package required states to maintain or increase welfare spending, resulting in cash-strapped states cutting back their own spending on useful things like transportation. As a result, Investor’s Business Daily noted, economists “found that despite the influx of all that federal money, highway construction jobs actually plunged by nearly 70,000 between 2008 and 2010.” The $800 billion stimulus package was purged of most investments in roads and bridges, and filled instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women. “A recent Associated Press story reports: ‘Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.’ A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.” Two economics professors recently estimated that the stimulus had actually wiped out 550,000 jobs. The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against meaningful welfare reform as an Illinois legislator. This claim was as dishonest as his claim that he would enact a “net spending cut” (which he flouted as soon as he took office) and that America would undergo an “irreversible decline” if the stimulus package wasn’t enacted (when even the CBO admitted that the stimulus will actually shrink the economy over the long run).

***

Then in 2012:

According to Investor’s Business Daily this week, a new analysis by Ohio State University economics professor Bill Dupor reported that “(m)ore than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by President Obama’s economic stimulus in the first year were in government.”

Dupor and another colleague had earlier concluded that the porkulus was a predictable jobs-killer that crowded out non-government jobs with make-work public jobs and programs. Indeed, the massive wealth redistribution scheme “destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs” by siphoning tax dollars “to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.”

Will this Keynesian wreckage come up during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate? It should be a centerpiece of domestic policy discussion. Nowhere is the gulf between Obama/Biden rhetoric and reality on jobs wider.

Remember: Obama’s Ivy League eggheads behind the stimulus promised that “(m)ore than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector.” These are the same feckless economic advisers who infamously vowed that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent — and that unemployment would drop below 6 percent sometime this year.

Sheriff Joe rebuked the “naysayers” who decried the behemoth stimulus program’s waste, fraud and abuse. “You know what? They were wrong,” he crowed.

But Biden was radio silent about the nearly 4,000 stimulus recipients who received $24 billion in Recovery Act funds — while owing more than $750 million in unpaid corporate, payroll and other taxes. (Cash for Tax Cheats, anyone?)

He had nothing to say about the $6 billion in stimulus energy credits for homeowners that went to nearly a third of credit-claimers who had no record of homeownership, including minors and prisoners.

And the $530 million dumped into the profligate Detroit public schools for laptops and other computer equipment that have had little, if any, measurable academic benefits.

And the whopping $6.7 million cost per job under the $50 billion stimulus-funded green energy loan program — which funded politically connected but now bankrupt solar firms Solyndra ($535 million), Abound Solar ($400 million), Beacon Power ($43 million), A123 ($250 million) and Ener1 ($119 million). (The con game of just Solyndra for extra credit reading)

And the $1 million in stimulus cash that went to Big Bird and Sesame Street “to promote healthy eating,” which created a theoretical “1.47” jobs. (As Sean Higgins of The Examiner noted, “(T)hat comes out to about $726,000 per job created.”)

And the hundreds of millions in stimulus money steered to General Services Administrations junkets in Las Vegas and Hawaii, ghost congressional districts, dead people, infrastructure to nowhere and ubiquitous stimulus propaganda road signs stamped with the shovel-ready logo.

Of course, there’s no example of unfettered stimulus squandering more fitting than the one named after Keystone Fiscal Kop Joe Biden himself. Government-funded Amtrak’s Wilmington, Del., station raked in $20 million in “recovery” money after heavy personal lobbying by the state’s most prominent customer and cheerleader. In return, the station (which came in $6 million over budget, according to The Washington Times) renamed its facility after Biden.

Bloated costs. Crony political narcissism. Glaring conflicts of interest. Monumental waste. This is the Obama/Biden stimulus legacy bequeathed to our children and their grandchildren. Sheriff Joe and his plundering boss need to be run out of town on a rail. More here.

2017, U.S. Knew the Safety Risks of the Wuhan Virology Lab

Posted on April 14, 2020April 14, 2020 by Denise Simon

But it gets much worse….so we will begin with the diplomatic cables…

A woman wearing a protective suit at a hospital in Wuhan, China. (Aly Song/Reuters)

Josh Rogin

April 14, 2020

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic. More here.

Now, exactly why would a U.S. delegation visit the Wuhan laboratory in the first place and be granted permission to do so?

Experts in the field of virology have been collaborating on research related to viruses in China for years. This includes government health officials, university research/medical schools as well as scientists and laboratory technicians. Last month, I published an article about the collaboration between various health/virus experts and the P4 laboratory in question located in Wuhan, using Duke NUS Medical School as but one example.

But, there is another reason for U.S. access and that is the U.S, government gave a sizeable grant to the Wuhan laboratory at the center of the pandemic. Yes, a mere $3.7 MILLION. Likely, the most experienced scientist at this facility is Shi Zhengli. She is honest, candid and desperate. She gladly works with organizations outside of China and even asked for more U.S. help with security measures and control of the facility.

Hold on….here is the backstory…

The Chinese laboratory at the center of scrutiny over a potential coronavirus leak has been using U.S. government money to carry out research on bats from the caves which scientists believe are the original source of the deadly outbreak.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan which were funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.

Sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has traced it back to bats found in Yunnan caves but it was first thought to have transferred to humans at an animal market in Wuhan.

The revelation that the Wuhan Institute was experimenting on bats from the area already known to be the source of COVID-19 – and doing so with American money – has sparked further fears that the lab, and not the market, is the original outbreak source.

Lawmakers and pressure groups were quick to hit out at U.S. funding being provided for the ‘dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute’.

US Congressman Matt Gaetz said: ‘I’m disgusted to learn that for years the US government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities.’

On Saturday, Anthony Bellotti, president of the US pressure group White Coat Waste, condemned his government for spending tax dollars in China, adding: ‘Animals infected with viruses or otherwise sickened and abused in Chinese labs reportedly may be sold to wet markets for consumption once experiments are done.’

The $37million Wuhan Institute of Virology, the most advanced laboratory of its type on the Chinese mainland, is based twenty miles from the now infamous wildlife market that was thought to be the location of the original transfer of the virus from animals to humans.

According to documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday, scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments.

The NIH is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research.

The Wuhan Institute lists them on their website as a partner as well as several other American academic institutions.

Other U.S. partners include the University of Alabama, the University of North Texas, Harvard University, and the National Wildlife Federation.

As part of the NIH research at the institute, scientists grew a coronavirus in a lab and injected it into three-day-old piglets.

The news that COVID-19 bats were under research there means that a leak from the Wuhan laboratory can no longer be completely ruled out.

According to one unverified claim, scientists at the institute could have become infected after being sprayed with blood containing the virus, and then passed it on to the local community.

A second institute in the city, the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control – which is barely three miles from the market – is also believed to have carried out experiments on animals such as bats to examine the transmission of coronaviruses.

The Wuhan Institute, which keeps more than 1,500 strains of deadly viruses, specializes in the research of ‘the most dangerous pathogens’, in particular the viruses carried by bats.

Chinese officials decided to build the institute after the country was ravaged by an outbreak of SARS in 2002 and 2003.

SARS, another kind of coronavirus, killed 775 people and infected more than 8,000 globally in an epidemic.

Since an outbreak of the novel coronavirus emerged in the city in December, it has been at the center of conspiracy theories which suggest that the bug originated there.

While scientists believe that the virus jumped to humans from wild animals sold as food in a market in Wuhan, conspiracy theorists promote different assumptions.

Some of them claim that the virus, formally known as SARS-CoV-2, could be a biological warfare weapon engineered there. Others suspect that it escaped from the lab.

China has repeatedly denied the allegations.

Shi Zhengli, a deputy director of the institute, told the press in February that she ‘guaranteed with her own life’ that the outbreak was not related to the lab.

She admits that when summoned back from a conference to investigate the new disease, she wondered at first if a coronavirus could have escaped from her unit.

She has warned about the danger of epidemics from bat-borne viruses.

But she says she did not expect such an outbreak in Wuhan, in the center of China, since her studies suggested subtropical areas in the south had the highest risk of such ‘zoonotic’ transmission to humans.

Shi told the respected science journal Scientific American last month of her relief when, having checked back through disposal records, none of the genome sequences matched their virus samples.

‘That really took a load off my mind. I had not slept a wink for days,’ she said.

Many international experts have also dismissed such theories.

Dr Keusch, Professor of Medicine and International Health at Boston University’s Schools of Medicine and Public Health, stressed that no release of viruses from a high-level lab, such as the one in Wuhan, ‘has ever happened’.

He defended his peers in the Chinese city as he said: ‘The Wuhan lab is designed to the highest standards with redundant safety systems and the highest level of training.

‘Many of its research faculty trained at a similar laboratory in Galveston, Texas. So we know the Wuhan team is as qualified as the Texas group…

‘This means the assertion of a leak, rather than being highly likely, instead is highly unlikely.’

Last week, further doubt was cast on the animal market theory, however, after Cao Bin, a doctor at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, highlighted research showing that 13 of the first 41 patients diagnosed with the infection had not had any contact with the market.

‘It seems clear that the seafood market is not the only origin of the virus,’ he said.

American biosecurity expert Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, New Jersey, said that while the evidence suggests COVID-19 was not created in one of the Wuhan laboratories, it could easily have escaped from there while it was being analyzed.

Prof Ebright said he has seen evidence that scientists at the Centre for Disease Control and the Institute of Virology studied the viruses with only ‘level 2’ security – rather than the recommended level 4 – which ‘provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers’.

He added: ‘Virus collection, culture, isolation, or animal infection would pose a substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker then the public.’

He concluded that the evidence left ‘a basis to rule out [that coronavirus is] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab accident’.

Results of the U.S-funded research at the Wuhan Institute were published in November 2017 under the heading: ‘Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.’

The exercise was summarized as: ‘Bats in a cave in Yunnan, China were captured and sampled for coronaviruses used for lab experiments.

‘All sampling procedures were performed by veterinarians with approval from the Animal Ethics Committee of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

‘Bat samplings were conducted ten times from April 2011 to October 2015 at different seasons in their natural habitat at a single location (cave) in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. Bats were trapped and faecal swab samples were collected.’

Another study, published in April 2018, was titled ‘fatal swine acute diarrhoea syndrome caused by an HKU2-related coronavirus of bat origin’ and described the research as such: ‘Following a 2016 bat-related coronavirus outbreak on Chinese pig farms, bats were captured in a cave and samples were taken.

Experimenters grew the virus in a lab and injected it into three-day-old piglets.

Intestinal samples from sick piglets were ground up and fed to other piglets as well.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 108,000 people and infected over 1.7 million worldwide.’

On Saturday, the American outbreak became the deadliest in the world over 2,000 deaths in a day.

The national deaths toll is 20,087 and there are 522,643 confirmed cases as of Saturday evening.

China muzzled its Bat Woman: Beijing authorities hushed up the findings of a scientist who unlocked the genetic make-up of the coronavirus within days of the outbreak – which is vital for tests and vaccines

A Chinese scientist who is the one of the world’s leading experts on coronaviruses was ‘muzzled’ after unraveling the genetic composition of the new disease, which is crucial for developing diagnostic tests and vaccines.

The revelation will fuel fresh concerns over China‘s cover-up of the pandemic after it erupted in the city of Wuhan. Critics argue that Communist Party chiefs frustrated efforts to contain the outbreak before it exploded around the world.

At the centre of the new claims is Shi Zhengli, known as China’s ‘Bat Woman’ after years spent on difficult virus-hunting expeditions in dank caves that have led to a series of important scientific discoveries.

The virologist was called back to her highsecurity laboratory in Wuhan at the end of last year after a mysterious new respiratory condition in the city was identified as a novel coronavirus – and within three days she completed its gene sequencing.

Her team’s work, and several other breakthroughs in subsequent days, indicated the virus was linked to horseshoe bats found more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan, a region of southern China.

Their findings showed it was similar to SARS, a respiratory disease that sparked an epidemic in 33 countries after emerging from China in 2002.

Gao Yu, a Chinese journalist freed last week after 76 days of lockdown in Wuhan, said he spoke to Shi during his incarceration and revealed: ‘We learned later her institute finished gene-sequencing and related tests as early as January 2 but was muzzled.’

The Mail on Sunday has learned that on that same day, Yanyi Wang, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, sent an email to staff and key officials ordering them not to disclose information on the disease.

She warned, according to a leak on social media confirmed by activists and Hong Kong media, that ‘inappropriate and inaccurate information’was causing ‘general panic’ – thought to refer to eight whistle-blowing doctors whose warnings to local citizens had led to their arrest.

Wang said the National Health Commission ‘unequivocally requires that any tests, clinical data, test results, conclusions related to the epidemic shall not be posted on social media platforms, nor shall [it] be disclosed to any media outlets including government official media, nor shall [it] be disclosed to partner institutions.’

Eight days later, a team led by a professor in Shanghai who received samples from an infected patient, published a genome sequence on an open access platform.

His laboratory was closed for ‘rectification’ two days later.

At the time, the public was being told that no new cases had been reported in Wuhan for more than a week and there was no clear evidence of human transmission, although dozens of health workers were starting to fall ill with the disease.

In an online lecture last month, Shi Zhengli said her team found on January 14 that the new virus could infect people – six days before this fact was revealed by China.

On the same day, the World Health Organisation issued a tweet backing China’s denials of human transmissions.

Shi’s team released its data identifying the disease on January 23 on a scientific portal before publication the next month by the journal Nature.

It said the genomic sequence was 96 per cent identical to another virus they found in horseshoe bats in Yunnan.

Shi is a specialist in emerging diseases and has earned global acclaim for work investigating links between bats and coronaviruses, aided by expeditions to collect samples and swabs in the fetid cave networks of southern China.

She was a key part of the team that traced SARS to horseshoe bats through civets, a cat-like creature often eaten in China.

Hat tip –> By Frances Mulraney and Glenn Owen For The Mail On Sunday

GWB was Obsessed with Pandemic Preparations in 2005

Posted on April 5, 2020April 5, 2020 by Denise Simon

The efforts of the Bush administration was intense over the ensuing three years, including exercises where cabinet officials gamed out their responses, but it was not sustained. Large swaths of the ambitious plan were either not fully realized or entirely shelved as other priorities and crises took hold.

“There was a realization that it’s no longer fantastical to raise scenarios about planes falling from the sky, or anthrax arriving in the mail,” said Tom Bossert, who worked in the Bush White House and went on to serve as a homeland security adviser in the Trump administration. “It was not a novel. It was the world we were living.”

According to Bossert, who is now an ABC News contributor, Bush did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it.

“He was completely taken by the reality that that was going to happen,” Bossert said. In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail — describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time.

“If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine on line quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain,” he said.

Bush set out to spend $7 billion building out his plan. His cabinet secretaries urged their staffs to take preparations seriously. The government launched a website, www.pandemicflu.gov, that is still in use today. But as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to justify the continued funding, staffing and attention, Bossert said.

“You need to have annual budget commitment. You need to have institutions that can survive any one administration. And you need to have leadership experience,” Bossert said. “All three of those can be effected by our wonderful and unique form of government in which you transfer power every four years.”

***

Then in 2006, enter Senator Burr:

The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (PAHPAI) is legislation introduced and passed by the U.S. Congress in 2019 that aims to improve the nation’s preparation and response to public health threats, including both natural threats and deliberate man-made threats.^[1]

A previous bill (with a near-identical name), the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), was signed into law in 2006 and reauthorized in 2013 in order to create a system that prepares for, and responds to, public health threats that could turn into emergencies.

The 2019 bill (PAHPAI) was introduced by U.S. Senators Richard Burr (R-NC), Bob Casey (D-PA), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Patty Murray (D-WA).^[1] Congress passed the bill and sent it to President Trump for his signature in June 2019. (The bill number is S. 1379).

What went on at the State level during all this time? Well in recent years, there was an exercise called Crimson Contagion.

Crimson Contagion 2019 was/is a Functional Exercise, a national level exercise series conducted to detect gaps in mechanisms, capabilities, plans, policies, and procedures in the event of a pandemic influenza. Current strategies include the Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plans (2018), Pandemic Influenza Plan (2017 Update), Pandemic Crisis Action Plan Version 2.0, and CDC’s Pandemic Influenza Appendix to the Biological Incident Annex of the CDC All-Hazard Plan (December 2017). These plans, updated over the last few years, were tested by the functional exercise with emphasis on the examination of strategic priorities set by the NSC. Specifically, examined priorities include operational coordination and communications, stabilization and restoration of critical lifelines, national security emergencies, public health emergencies, and continuity. The Crimson Contagion 2019 Functional Exercise included participation of almost 300 entities – 19 federal departments and agencies, 12 states, 15 tribal nations and pueblos, 74 local health departments and coalition regions, 87 hospitals, 40 private sector organizations, and 35 active operations centers. The scenario was a large-scale outbreak of H7N9 avian influenza, originating in China but swiftly spreading to the contiguous US with the first case detected in Chicago, Illinois. Continuous human-to-human transmission of the H7N9 virus encourages its spread across the country and, unfortunately, the stockpiles of H7N9 vaccines are not a match for the outbreak’s strain; however, those vaccines are serviceable as a priming dose. Also, the strain of virus is susceptible to Relenza and Tamiflu antiviral medications. The exercise was intended to deal with a virus outbreak that starts overseas and migrates to the US with scant allocated resources for outbreak response and management, thereby forcing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to include other agencies in the response. To do so, the exercise began 47 days after the identification of the first US case of H7N9 in Chicago, otherwise known as STARTEX conditions. Then, the HHS declared the outbreak as a Public Health Emergency (PHE), the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic, and the President of the United States declared a National Emergency under the National Emergencies Act. As was the case in the 1918 Great Influenza, transmissibility is high and cases are severe. At STARTEX, there are 2.1 million illnesses and 100 million forecasted illnesses as well as over half a million forecasted deaths. As the pandemic progresses along the epidemiological curve, the overarching foci of the federal-level response adjusts across four phases:

Operational coordination with public messaging and risk communication

Situational awareness, information sharing, and reporting

Financing

Continuity of operations

The outcome of the Crimson Contagion is that vaccine development is the silver bullet to such an outbreak, but there are complications beyond its formulation. Namely, the minimization of outbreak impact prior to vaccine development and dispersal, strategy for efficient dissemination of the vaccine across the country, allocation of personal protective equipment (PPE), and high expense of vaccine development and PPE acquisitions. The exercise concluded that HHS requires about $10 billion in additional funding immediately following the identification of a novel strain of pandemic influenza. The low inventory levels of PPE and other countermeasures are a result of insufficient domestic manufacturing in the US and a lack of raw materials maintained within US borders. Additionally, the exercise revealed six key findings:

Existing statutory authorities, policies, and funding of HHS are insufficient for a federal response to an influenza pandemic

Current planning fails to outline the organizational structure of the federal government response when HHS is the designated lead agency; planning also varies across local, state, territorial, tribal, and federal entities

There is a lack of clarity in operational coordination regarding the roles and responsibility of agencies as well as in the coordination of information, guidance, and actions of federal agencies, state agencies, and the health sector

Situation assessment is inefficient and incomplete due to the lack of clear guidance on the information required and confusion in the distribution of recommended protocols and products

The medical countermeasures supply chain and production capacity are currently insufficient to meet the needs of the country in the event of pandemic influenza

There is clear dissemination of public health and responder information from the CDC, but confusion about school closures remains.

A few years go, DHS published the National Response Framework Second Edition May 2013 and later, FEMA published a 143 page report known as the Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plans Final – January 2017

as a follow up to the work that began in 2008.

Many things certainly were going on that otherwise have not received media attention and the above is by no means a full accounting. The above is only referenced for perspective and context.

So while so many are working to find a single solution to Covid 19, there is not one cure but more in the realm of hundreds or perhaps thousands. Furthermore, while so many want to place blame, that too is misguided to point to U.S. politicians and medical experts. When it comes to Dr. Fauci or Bill Gates and his Event 201, understand that every medical counter-measure to pandemics call for growing viruses in laboratories and getting patents for the work each does including pharmaceutical companies and universities. We of course have the bureaucracy of clinical trials and they do take lots of time to launch and process.

Slow down readers, stop with the blame games, stop with finding fault, let’s deal with the here and now to get this behind us, never to repeat. If anything, blame the Communist Party of China, begin and end there and re-examine national policy with Beijing.

Vendors Return in Wuhan as China Prepares COVID-19 ... source

While Pelosi and Schiff have a new oversight commission led by Congressman Clyburn, which was in the $2T stimulus bill, so what? You say it is just another plot to go for another impeachment of President Trump? Nah…it is only the Democrats and media’s plot and wont happen. A full investigation of all things Covid 19 would hardly be completed by 2024.

Oh yeah, for those of you angry at Senator Burr for selling stock, we dont know how many in congress did sell stock. Remember, Senator Burr authored that pandemic bill in 2006….and it was signed into law.

Senators did receive a closed-door briefing on the virus on Jan. 24, which was public knowledge. A separate briefing was held Feb. 12 by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which Burr is a member of. It’s unclear if he attended either session.

One must ask if the Senate Intelligence Committee received the briefing, who gave the briefing and did that same briefing happen in the House? That is always the policy. If so, how come the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, you know, Adam Schiff never said a thing about it. Inquiring minds want to know.

Meanwhile….

Just follow hygiene rules and let’s get America into full restoration mode…FAST.

U.S. Using Wide Range of Spy Tools to Monitor Coronavirus

Posted on February 29, 2020February 29, 2020 by Denise Simon

A major fall of nitrogen dioxide in China since the outbreak of Covid-19.

Nitrogen dioxide is a nasty-smelling gas. Some nitrogen dioxide is formed naturally in the atmosphere by lightning and some is produced by plants, soil and water. However, only about 1% of the total amount of nitrogen dioxide found in our cities’ air is formed this way.

Nitrogen dioxide is an important air pollutant because it contributes to the formation of photochemical smog, which can have significant impacts on human health. The main effect of breathing in raised levels of nitrogen dioxide is the increased likelihood of respiratory problems. Nitrogen dioxide inflames the lining of the lungs, and it can reduce immunity to lung infections. This can cause problems such as wheezing, coughing, colds, flu and bronchitis.

***

United States intelligence agencies are using “a wide range” of tools, ranging from open-source collection to communications interception and human intelligence, to collect desperately needed data about the spread of the coronavirus, according to sources. As of late last week, some of the most dependable data on the spread of the virus, known as COVID-19, came from military channels of information, according to Yahoo News’ National Security and Investigations Reporter Jenna McLaughlin.

Writing last Friday, McLaughlin cited “two sources familiar with the matter”, who said that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Global Issues Mission Center were collecting and analyzing real-time data on the coronavirus. The spread of the disease was also being monitored by the National Center for Medical Intelligence, which assesses the impact of disease outbreaks on American and foreign military personnel, said McLaughlin. She added that the intelligence generated by these agencies was being channeled to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services, which lead the White House’s Task Force on COVID-19.

A major concern of the US Intelligence Community is that the Chinese, Iranian and other governments around the world may not be sharing comprehensive data on the spread of the virus and its impact. “No data means spying”, one unnamed source told McLaughlin. According to Reuters’ Mark Hosenball, US intelligence agencies have been using “a wide range of intelligence tools”, including human intelligence and electronic communications interception to track the spread of COVID-19. A major question that US intelligence agencies are trying to answer is whether governments like China’s or Iran’s have effective “continuity operations” plans in place, which relate to preserving the main functions of government during a major national disaster.

According to Hosenball, there is pessimism among US intelligence experts about the ability of developing countries around the world to respond to a massive COVID-19 outbreak. One example is India, whose dense population and rudimentary public-health infrastructure raises serious concerns about the government’s ability to protect the country’s population from a major pandemic. The report adds that there “deep concern” in US government circles about the possibility that Iran may be covering up the details about the spread of COVID-19.

***

The coronavirus is coinciding with “significant decreases” in nitrogen dioxide over China, according to NASA, as authorities there continue to place more people under quarantines and some businesses remain closed amid the outbreak.

Pollution monitoring satellites operated by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) detected the decreases over a two-month span, according to a news release. The drops coincided with the outbreak and the Lunar New Year, which was unusually tame because many decided to stay indoors rather than risk becoming infected.

Nitrogen dioxide levels over China decreased dramatically as China continues to grapple with the coronavirus outbreak.

In January, Chinese authorities locked down several cities and shut down all transportation going into and out of the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.

The pollution reduction is shown in two maps released by the space agencies. The first shows large concentrations of nitrogen dioxide levels over Beijing and near Wuhan from Jan. 1 through 20, before mandated quarantines were issued. More here.

Senator Daines vs. Socialism

Posted on July 30, 2019July 30, 2019 by Denise Simon

Resolution_draft by Fox News on Scribd

In his prepared remarks introducing the resolution, obtained by Fox News, Daines criticized the Green New Deal and “Medicare-for-all” — as well as the increase in partisanship on Capitol Hill. Less than an hour earlier, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., similarly condemned “hyperventilating hacks” seeking to sow division, rather than make policy.

Daines Stumps For Gorsuch, Spars With Protesters At ...

“We are at a pivotal time in our great nation’s history,” Daines said. “We have shown the world time and time again the genius of American ingenuity and the grit of American determination. However, a radical, socialist, far-left movement is growing across this country. And it has taken root as the new voice of the Democratic Party.”

*** A hat tip to the Senator for his position on America vs. Democrats, Socialism and all things related to the Green New Deal. There is also Medicare for All, free college tuition and even paying criminals to behave.

Does this resolution go far enough? Not really, but it is a start. There should be legislation and eventually law that states socialism is forbidden in the United States. It is wishful thinking however, because our Federal government is slammed full with socialist programs that we can never undo.

All things government healthcare like Obamacare is socialism, Social Security is of course socialism, block grants, community reinvestment act and so many more fit the definition of socialism as do the countless entitlement programs.

You can however begin the challenge on yet another item that you personally pay each month. Have you checked your utility bills lately and looked at all those weird fees? Same thing with your cell phone bill. The cable bill too? Yes.

There is corporate socialism too, bailouts and subsidies…yes…all socialism. This is forced socialism with no oversight. That means no one is accountable, no one measures success, no one measures if the money really goes where it is supposed to go.

Places like Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore and other major cities all have a major homeless program where tax money is earmarked to address that crisis. For instance, California voted in March to approve a quarter-cent sales tax increase to help the homeless. It is expected to raise $355 million each year for a ten year period. That said, do California officials and residents really believe the homeless problem will go away in ten years? Really?

As long as Baltimore is in the news, thousands of residents in the inner city get a lead check along with living in Section 8 housing and getting food stamps. What is a lead check you ask?

Well our Congress voted in the 1990’s to create a slush fund to eradicate lead (paint) from homes and buildings constructed before 1977. By now, all that lead should be gone right? Nah..residents in Baltimore and other major cities get a monthly lead check as they choose to live in row houses allegedly still containing peeling lead paint. This whole scam was coordinated by several federal agencies including Housing and Urban Development, the EPA and Health and Human Services.

Socialism is a constant cancer, of which the ends we will never see but we can stop some of it at least by challenging those pesky fees in your power bill, the cable bill or your cell phone bill.

Anyway….hat tip again to the Senator.