Testing Criteria

The FDA wants to add new Wuhan Virus vaccine testing criteria to emergency use authorization applications—weeks after several pharma companies’ Phase III trials (the last phase requiring substantial data collection before EUA can be requested, the phase whose satisfactory completion is required before general use authorization can be requested) already have begun.

As part of the new guidelines, manufacturers seeking authorization would have to follow trial participants for at least two months after a second vaccine shot.
The new standards would also reportedly ask developers to identify a specific number of severe COVID-19 cases in patients who received a placebo in trials.

These data collection steps would be useful; however, it’s ridiculous to try to make them Critical Items for EUA. The FDA has known the structure of existing tests all along—it approved those tests’ advance into Phase III trials. If the FDA really thought these new “standards” and data collection criteria were important, it would have levied them on the original pharma companies at the time it approved their Phase III trials.

Waiting until this late date to try to add them is suspicious.

Court Packing

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D, MI) was asked, on a conference call involving conference call Wednesday with Senators Tammy Baldwin (D, WI), Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY)

if they support “stacking the court” in response to the GOP proceeding with the nomination to fill the vacancy.
“I would say we want to take it one step at a time,” Stabenow replied. “We’re focused on what we need to do right now to be able to get [] four Republicans to join us.

That’s a pretty clear indication that Stabenow considers packing the Supreme Court to be a viable step. She and her cohorts’ first step will be to give uppity Republicans a chance to fall in line “voluntarily.”

Laid Bare

The Progressive-Democrats in the Senate object to President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. They object, as I write this, even before they know who that nominee is—it could be me, for all they know, but they object.

This has nothing to do with the qualifications of that nominee-to-be; it has everything to do with what they consider to be their personally owned seat on the Court—just like they’ve been trying to block the squatter in their private house known colloquially as the White House.

This obstruction for obstruction’s sake was made plain by Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne “the dogma lives loudly within you” Feinstein.

I don’t have a lot of tools to use, but I’m going to use what I have. We can try to delay and obstruct but they can run this process through. That doesn’t mean that we won’t fight tooth and nail.

Nothing in her obstruction that relates to the nominee-to-be’s qualification for office. Not a syllable. Not a phoneme. Progressive-Democrats don’t care a whit about qualifications or capabilities. Only about ownership and encompassed power.

“Fair Enough”

That’s what The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board thinks of Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s rationalization of his refusal to publish his list (assuming it exists) of judges from which he’d pick nominations to the Supreme Court.

Mr Biden has resisted naming individuals he’d consider for the Supreme Court, saying it would subject them to undue criticism. Fair enough—Mr Trump’s practice of making his short-list public is not required of other candidates.

Fair enough? No. Ridiculous and cynical. Trump’s lists of judges from which he’d select nominees for judge and Justice have been long publicized. The lists themselves have been criticized for not being definitive enough or lacking this or that candidate—the stuff of all lists. Judges on the lists have been criticized, too, with commentary on their writings and opinions suggesting too much conservatism or not enough.

But the only time—the only judge—on all of those lists “undue criticism” (a cynical euphemism if ever there was one in the present case) has occurred has been the present all-out assault on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s religion, integrity, and character being perpetrated by Biden’s Party cronies and Party supporters in the NLMSM.

Biden’s rationalization is wholly cynical if it isn’t merely projection.

Then there’s Biden’s primary criteria for anyone he’d nominate for the Supreme Court. Like Party’s pick for his Vice President candidate, Biden’s judicial criteria are, first and foremost, gender and race.

[H]e would appoint the first African-American woman to the Supreme Court.

His nominee’s understandings of our Constitution, of judicial oaths of office, of law don’t enter into it until far down his list of qualifying criteria.

The intrinsic sexist and racist bigotry in Biden’s selection criteria is just disgusting. It’s no wonder he doesn’t want to talk overmuch about his potential nominees.

“Sharing a household with children and risk of COVID-19”

That’s the title of a medRxiv preprint (unpeer-reviewed) paper that looked at the risk to adults—in particular, Scottish NHS healthcare workers, NHS-contracted general practice service providers, and members of their households—of contracting the Wuhan Virus (my term) when they lived in households with children with ages ranging from new-born to 11 years old. Total participants numbered more than 300,000 adults and children.

The results are correlative rather than causative, but the strength of the correlation is strongly suggestive.

The risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 was lower in those with one child and lower still in those with two or more children….

And the money quote:

Conclusion[:] Increased household exposure to young children was associated with an attenuated risk of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 and appeared to also be associated with an attenuated risk of COVID-19 disease severe enough to require hospitalisation.

That suggests, also (my conclusion; the authors didn’t address the matter), that putting children back in school (at least grade school) poses no serious risk of spreading serious illness from the virus.

The preprint abstract can be read here.