Make the Whole Nation an Opportunity Zone

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

Having just interviewed for a radio segment, Joel Griffith, an economic expert at the Heritage Foundation, I was motivated to draft this piece about how America re-opens and what will America look like in coming years.

Years ago, during the genesis of the dot com era, companies across the nation were launching incubation centers where innovation, creators and entrepreneurs were mobilized to advance business opportunity across all industries. Governments at all levels should get out of the way with stifling red tape, permits, fees, regulations, taxes and other bureaucratic measures to unleash business transformations.

So, Joel answered that the whole nation should be an opportunity zone where I used incubation centers….same thing.

Just about to collect some thoughts on this article, here comes an email from my favorite law firm, The Pacific Legal Foundation. The firm just published an economic recovery action plan. This plan is a framework that quite useful in supporting the notions of a nationwide economic zone policy or incubation centers.

The plan has 4 simple steps but each one is profound to the principles of economic restoration and practical.

Liberate Healthcare
Embrace Entrepreneurs
Protect Property Rights
Get Bureaucrats out of the Way

As the Trump Administration has gathered political and business professionals for the Economic Restoration Council that includes an estimated 100 business personnel from countless industries, new guidance will be shared with all 50 governors to use as a framework to reopen their respective states. This is a perfect moment in time to consider and deploy a revolution in ideas, resources and to eliminate vulnerabilities in the whole society such that lessons learned can be produce new skill sets and advanced solutions to encourage small business across sectors.

How to Be an Entrepreneur in Top 5 Easy Steps - Ejournalz

The marketplace is sure to change not only for America but across the globe as these discussions with unleashed imaginations are sure to alter everyday commerce, education, healthcare, national security, communications, hospitality, entertainment and perhaps even legislation.

A new discipline in our culture may just be creative new breakthroughs taken from lessons learned due to this pandemic and self-distancing. Where do ideas come from? They begin with discussions to questions we have all asked like: Why don’t we have…How come no one has invented….How did we get here….What do we do now….How do we make sure this does not happen again….

Our country is in distress so the bigger question that should be asked is how do we succeed as an individual, a family and as a business. Rewards are great when one has planned for risks and strategies during any type of crisis. Self management and that of all business is the purposeful task of a systematic strategy that fosters mood, creativity, production, perception and opportunities.

The ‘opportunity zones’ in place today in all 50 states is derived from the TCJA, The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Sounds great, however OZ’s leave behind or omits innovation across all regions. Investment capital generally is habitually applied to known and or proven commercial models, brushing aside ventures concepts that take risks unknown and unproven that with some development can be the next Fortune 500 success story.

Breaking Down the Benefits of Investing in the Opportunity ...

The Opportunity Zone concept must be considered in all framework guidance coming from the Federal government to the state and local governments to restart the nation, economic liberty, grow the GDP, improve the employment landscape and realize financial victory at all levels.

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.

The Reason for the WH and Dr. Birx Chilling New Probability Report

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by Denise Simon

Primer: We all seem to guess this except for Jim Acosta/CNN and the others at MSNBC. Media continues to blame the Trump White House for the slow response to address COVID-19, while Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci explained what they did not know very early on. Now we know.

Now some real questions and new policy towards China must be considered. We can start with the $1.8 T in U.S. debt that China holds. The next is challenging American telecommunications companies to squelch China’s advances of 5G. Then there is the next phase of the U.S. trade agreement with China. Add in the mission to stop China’s power agenda across the globe as it is clear, China is fine with killing people and economies across the world.

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said. The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

Communications staff at the White House and Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations, there has been considerable skepticism of China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country. The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total.

Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.

Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said Tuesday that China’s public reporting influenced assumptions elsewhere in the world about the nature of the virus.

source

“The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”

China is not the only country with suspect public reporting. Western officials have pointed to Iran, Russia, Indonesia and especially North Korea, which has not reported a single case of the disease, as probable under-counts. Others including Saudi Arabia and Egypt may also be playing down their numbers.

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has publicly urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks. He has repeatedly accused China of covering up the extent of the problem and being slow to share information, especially in the weeks after the virus first emerged, and blocking offers of help from American experts.

“This data set matters,” he said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. The development of medical therapies and public-health measures to combat the virus “so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired,” he said.

“I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information,” he said. “We’re doing that.”

The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

source

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 outbreak containment strategies in China based on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) appear to be effective. Quantitative research is still needed however to assess the efficacy of different candidate NPIs and their timings to guide ongoing and future responses to epidemics of this emerging disease across the World. Methods: We built a travel network-based susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed (SEIR) model to simulate the outbreak across cities in mainland China. We used epidemiological parameters estimated for the early stage of outbreak in Wuhan to parameterise the transmission before NPIs were implemented. To quantify the relative effect of various NPIs, daily changes of delay from illness onset to the first reported case in each county were used as a proxy for the improvement of case identification and isolation across the outbreak. Historical and near-real time human movement data, obtained from Baidu location-based service, were used to derive the intensity of travel restrictions and contact reductions across China. The model and outputs were validated using daily reported case numbers, with a series of sensitivity analyses conducted. Results: We estimated that there were a total of 114,325 COVID-19 cases (interquartile range [IQR] 76,776 – 164,576) in mainland China as of February 29, 2020, and these were highly correlated (p<0.001, R2=0.86) with reported incidence. Without NPIs, the number of COVID-19 cases would likely have shown a 67-fold increase (IQR: 44 – 94), with the effectiveness of different interventions varying. The early detection and isolation of cases was estimated to prevent more infections than travel restrictions and contact reductions, but integrated NPIs would achieve the strongest and most rapid effect. If NPIs could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier in China, cases could have been reduced by 66%, 86%, and 95%, respectively, together with significantly reducing the number of affected areas. However, if NPIs were conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks later, the number of cases could have shown a 3-fold, 7-fold, and 18-fold increase across China, respectively. Results also suggest that the social distancing intervention should be continued for the next few months in China to prevent case numbers increasing again after travel restrictions were lifted on February 17, 2020. Conclusion: The NPIs deployed in China appear to be effectively containing the COVID-19 outbreak, but the efficacy of the different interventions varied, with the early case detection and contact reduction being the most effective. Moreover, deploying the NPIs early is also important to prevent further spread. Early and integrated NPI strategies should be prepared, adopted and adjusted to minimize health, social and economic impacts in affected regions around the World.

FBI Abuse of FISA Much Worse per New Report

Posted on March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 by Denise Simon

FBI problems with FISA warrants extend beyond Russia case, DOJ watchdog warns

The Justice Department’s chief watchdog issued an extraordinary warning Tuesday that the FBI is failing to follow its own rules when pursuing surveillance warrants in sensitive intelligence and terrorism cases, confirming that problems first exposed in the Russia collusion probe extend to other cases.

Among the problems cited was a failure by agents to substantiate allegations submitted to courts, similar to the missteps the FBI made in failing to ensure allegations in the Steele dossier back in 2016 were verified before securing a FISA warrant targeting the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page.

The report found that investigators:

could not review original Woods Files for four of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has not been able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed;

identified apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the 25 applications we reviewed;

identified deficiencies in documentary support and application accuracy;

interviewed FBI officials who indicated to us that there were no efforts by the FBI to use existing FBI and National Security Division oversight mechanisms to perform comprehensive, strategic assessments of the efficacy of the Woods Procedures or FISA accuracy.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee who played a key role in exposing FISA abuses during the Russia probe, said Horowitz’s memo show the problems first exposed with the faulty Carter Page warrant were “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Not a single application from the past five years reviewed by the inspector general was up to snuff. That’s alarming and unacceptable,” Grassley said.

“The FBI has an important job to protect our national security, but it does not have carte blanche to routinely erode the liberties of Americans without proper justification. Oversight mechanisms like the Woods Procedures exist for a reason, and if the FBI wants to restore its reputation among the American people, it had better start taking them seriously,” he added.

source

The final report just issued in .pdf is found here.

Additionally, NR has this summary in part:

Horowitz’s office said in a report released Tuesday that of the 29 applications — all of which involved U.S. citizens – that were pulled from “8 FBI field offices of varying sizes,” the FBI could not find Woods Files for four of the applications, while the other 25 all had “apparent errors or inadequately supported facts.”

“While our review of these issues and follow-up with case agents is still ongoing—and we have not made materiality judgments for these or other errors or concerns we identified—at this time we have identified an average of about 20 issues per application reviewed, with a high of approximately 65 issues in one application and less than 5 issues in another application,” the report reveals.

The Woods Procedure dictates that the Justice Department verify the accuracy and provide evidentiary support for all facts stated in its FISA application. The FBI is required to share with the FISA Court all relevant information compiled in the Woods File when applying for a surveillance warrant.

“FBI and NSD officials we interviewed indicated to us that there were no efforts by the FBI to use existing FBI and NSD oversight mechanisms to perform comprehensive, strategic assessments of the efficacy of the Woods Procedures or FISA accuracy, to include identifying the need for enhancements to training and improvements in the process, or increased accountability measures,” the report states.

The OIG concludes by recommending that the FBI “systematically and regularly examine the results of past and future accuracy reviews to identify patterns or trends in identified errors” relating to the Woods Procedure, as well as double-checking “that Woods Files exist for every FISA application submitted to the FISC in all pending investigations.”

In a letter acknowledging the audit, FBI Associate Deputy Director Paul Abbate said that the issues “will be addressed” by the Bureau’s already-issued correctives after the Carter Page review, and added that “the FBI fully accepts the two recommendations.”

McCabe admitted in January that the FBI has an “inherent weakness in the process” of obtaining FISA warrants.

China Supplied Faulty Coronavirus Test Kits

Posted on March 26, 2020March 26, 2020 by Denise Simon

Seems to be a systemic problem with China as in 2017, the Chinese Communist Party issued a sizable medical equipment recall for faulty quality. It is unclear just what equipment was included but the CCP said they would reissue equipment under tighter controls. Swell.

China Supplied Faulty Coronavirus Test Kits to Spain, Czech Republic source

Translated from El Pais newspaper:

The much-announced rapid tests for coronaviruses with which the Government wanted to start testing the broader layers of the population to find out what is the real size of the contagion in Spain do not work well. This has been confirmed by several microbiology laboratories of large hospitals in the analyzes that have been made of the kits recently arrived from China. The results of these preliminary tests are discouraging: “They do not detect the positive cases as expected,” says a source who has participated in the tests and who asks for anonymity.

The rapid tests, manufactured by the Chinese company Bioeasy, based in Shenzhen, one of the technological poles of the Asian country, have a sensitivity of 30%, when it should be above 80%, these sources indicate. One of the microbiologists who has analyzed the Chinese test assures: “With that value it does not make sense to use these tests.” The conclusion of the experts who have evaluated these detection kits is that they will have to continue using the current test, the PCR. This has been reported to the Carlos III Health Institute, under the Ministry of Health.

The price of the sale of Chinese medical equipment to Spain was $467 million. In the transaction of medical equipment was 950 ventilators, 5.5 million testing kits and 11 million gloves and 500 million protective face masks. Chinese blamed one of its own companies called Bioesy and declared the company was not licensed. Okay, sure Beijing.

***

From NR:

Up to 80 percent of the 150,000 portable, quick coronavirus test kits China delivered to the Czech Republic earlier this month were faulty, according to local Czech news site Expats.cz. The tests can produce a result in 10 or 15 minutes but are usually less accurate than other tests. Because of the high error rate, the country will continue to rely on conventional laboratory tests, of which they perform about 900 a day.

The country’s Health Ministry paid $546,000 for 100,000 of the test kits, while the Interior Ministry paid for the other 50,000.

Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Jan Hamacek downplayed the discovery that many of the tests were faulty, blaming it on a possible wrong methodology and saying the kits can still be used “when the disease has been around for some time,” or when “someone returns after quarantine after fourteen days.”

“In my opinion, this is not about some scandalous revelation that it is not working,” Hamacek said.

Meanwhile, Spain, which has more than 56,000 infected people and more than 4,000 coronavirus deaths, the second-highest number of fatalities in the world after Italy, found that the rapid coronavirus test kits it purchased from Chinese company Bioeasy only correctly identified 30 percent of virus cases, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais.

The director Spain’s Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies, Fernando Simón, said Spain tested 9,000 of the test kits and will return them based on their high error rate.

Studies performed on the tests which discovered the high error rate caused the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology to recommend officially that the tests not be used.

The Chinese embassy in Spain claimed the Bioeasy products are not included in the products China has been supplying to countries where the virus has broken out.

source

Spain has 49,515 confirmed cases and there have been so many deaths in one small town, the officials had to use an ice skating rink to hold the bodies for burial processing.