Capitalism shows its most ugly face!
That ad is from eBay – plenty of paper for sale at five times the store price – 12 “mega” rolls for $59.99. Now you know why the “gangs” were fighting to clean off the grocery store shelves. For many buyers, it wasn’t need, but deplorable greed.
Here’s another ripoff on eBay:
Toilet paper at $10 a roll! Buy a big package at the store, separate it into single rolls and make yourself rich, despite the tribulations you cause others.
Desperate folks are even bidding for toilet paper. The above was from eBay this morning – $54.75 w/shipping for 12 rolls (34 bids).
An eBay search for toilet paper at 4 pm today found 3,613 auctions, plus 13,940 lots for Buy It Now purchase
Who is worse than greedy hucksters?
#1. Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.
The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD) since 1984, Fauci oversees “basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose, and treat established infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis and malaria as well as emerging diseases such as Ebola and Zika,” according to the NIAD website.
Fauci is a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force established by President Donald Trump in late January.
As a member, on January 26 he claimed this about the coronavirus.
“It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,” Fauci said during an interview with radio show host John Catsimatidis.
But it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously… It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about.
Because we have ways of preparing and screening of people coming in [from China]. And we have ways of responding – like we did with this one case in Seattle, Washington, who had traveled to China and brought back the infection.
On Wednesday, last week, he went into scare mode, suggesting that COVID-19 is considerably more dangerous than the flu:
The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1 percent. This has a mortality rate of 10 times that. That’s the reason I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.
On this past Sunday’s Meet the Press Fauci warned that if the country fails to slow the trajectory, the number of domestic deaths could soar exponentially into the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
The worst is yet to come…to protect the American people, we’ll consider everything and anything on the table.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that between 20,000 to 52,000 Americans have died from influenza this season.
Using Fauci’s 10x premise, that means an uncontrolled COVID-19 epidemic would kill between 200,000 and 520,000 Americans.
Don’t believe it.
China, with nearly five times our population has only a total 3,300 deaths from the disease, and the epidemic there is nearly finished. China had only four new deaths and 36 new cases reported yesterday.
Using the China metric, the United States should expect 660 deaths, a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of flu deaths projected by Fauci.
Fauci’s weekend reckless comments sent the stock market into free fall on Monday.
In my opinion Fauci is the number one culprit in our corona virus debacle by first minimizing the danger, then exaggerating it beyond credulous belief.
If you have comments about his performance or questions, this is his public contact information:
#2. Recent Commissioners of Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Strict guidelines by the FDA have hampered development of testing methods in the United States, and the blame should be shared among the five commissioners appointed by President Trump in just his first term.
They each inherited a bad system, but didn’t fix it. The FDA rules stopped widespread test development until this month – much too late to identify victims and quarantine them effectively.
One example of FDA incompetence comes from Benjamin Pinsky, Medical Director of the Clinical Virology Laboratory at Stanford, who said his lab began working on a test in early February, following the overly strict FDA guidelines at the time.
When the FDA finally posted its more relaxed guidance, it took the Stanford lab only days to validate its test.
“We were waiting for the FDA to make a decision about how they would handle clinical laboratory testing,” Pinsky said.
My goal was to be prepared as soon as they were ready to allow clinical labs to start testing.
On March 2 Stanford got permission to begin testing. Before day’s end on March 4, Santa Clara County had already confirmed 14 cases. Too late! Results showed community spread was already underway.
A lab in San Francisco asked in early February if it could develop its own test under less extreme requirements, but the FDA refused, citing regulations:
Charles Chiu, associate director of the University of California at San Francisco Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, said:
We were trying to submit a clinical lab-developed test or develop a clinical test for emergency-use approval, and the issue with it was it was delayed, and that was because the FDA’s requirements were quite stringent.
The FDA was making it too laborious…it would take too long to actually get approval.
“I think that it would have been helpful had some of the new guidance come out earlier so that laboratories would have had more time, whereas now we’re scrambling to meet demand,” Chiu said.
If only we followed the lead of other nations, especially South Korea
There were 74 new coronavirus cases and no deaths reported in South Korea yesterday. The epidemic that struck 8,236 persons there has basically ended, leaving only 75 dead in a country of nearly 52 million.
If we experience a similar mortality rate, our deaths will be about 500 in a population of some 330 million.
South Korea put its labs and companies to work in January, and had effective test kits with four-hour results by early February.
Testing allows hot spots to be identified, affected citizens warned to take extra precautions and allows the healthcare system to focus efforts where most needed.
South Korea has tested 248,647 citizens, as of yesterday, compared to the U.S. total of 21,558.
More glaring is that South Korea has conducted 4,802 tests per million persons, compared to a minuscule 65 per million in this country – a disgrace for the supposed “best health care system in the world.”
Most other countries have a much higher rate of testing.
Review the table below, created here from analyzing World Health Organization statistics, and note the X million tests column.
America is doing worse at testing than not just South Korea, but also Bahrain, Iceland, Norway, Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Taiwan, Denmark, Russia, United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia, Lithuania, Malaysia, France, Hungary, Croatia, Japan, Thailand, Armenia and New Zealand.
You can fool nearly all the people... 