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The state of New York paid $69 million for ventilators to a man with no background in medical supplies after he tweeted at President Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus task force recommended him as a vendor, BuzzFeed News reported. The ventilators never arrived. On March 27, as the novel coronavirus was surging through the US, Trump urged Ford and General Motors on Twitter to "START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!" Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley, replied to the tweet, writing, "We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT." BuzzFeed reported that New...

US deaths from the novel coronavirus topped 60,000 on Wednesday and the outbreak will soon be deadlier than any flu season since 1967. America's worst flu season in recent years was in 2017-2018, when more than 61,000 people died, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The only deadlier flu seasons were in 1967 when about 100,000 Americans died, 1957 when 116,000 died and the Spanish flu of 1918 when 675,000 died, according to the CDC. The United States has the world's highest coronavirus death toll and a daily average of 2,000 people died in April of...

Most Americans would rather see former Vice President Joe Biden in charge of both the U.S. coronavirus response and the economy than current President Donald Trump, according to data from a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. However, while Biden may have the upper hand in polling in those areas, the results fall strongly along party lines. Out of those surveyed, 55 percent of those surveyed chose Biden over Trump to handle the coronavirus pandemic. While 40 percent of those polled said they would rather see Trump handling coronavirus issues in the U.S., 87 percent of those who supported Trump in that...

Polls appear to show that Mr Trump is losing ground to Democrat rival Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election. Amid the reports, the president is alleged to have shouted down the phone at his campaign manager Brad Parscale, three sources “close to the matter” told CNN. Mr Trump is said to have criticised Mr Parscale for the recent spate in falling poll numbers, and at one point threatened to take legal action. One Republican told CNN that: “He’s p** because he knows he messed up in those briefings.” Both the Trump campaign and the White House have not issued...

During an appearance Monday on Telemundo's "Un Nuevo Dia" to discuss the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked what he thought of Brad Pitt's portrayal of him in a skit that roasted President Donald Trump. "I think he did great," the 79-year-old physician and immunologist said of Pitt's "Saturday Night Live" appearance. "I mean, I'm a great fan of Brad Pitt, and that's the reason why when people ask me who'd I like to play me I mention Brad Pitt because he's one of my favorite actors. I think he did a great job."

Patients treated with hydroxychloroquine have no better chance of survival than those who don't receive the drug hailed by Trump as a 'game-changer', results of a New York state Health Department trial suggest. 'I think from the review that I heard basically it was not seen as a positive, not seen as a negative,' said Governor Andrew Cuomo during CNN's coronavirus town hall. Ultimately, the study, conducted by SUNY at Albany, is intended to involved some 4,000 coronavirus patients, but the preliminary results are from a sample of 600 patients. Survival rates were no better among the group treated with...

There is not, as of writing, any medication which has been shown in controlled trials to significantly hasten recovery from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus that's become a global pandemic. Last week, there were nonetheless some new developments on that front. One drug seems to show signs of promise. Another has seen red flags raised. The one that's raised hopes isn't the one that President Donald Trump has been hyping. Again: It is not the case that we have new, incontrovertible proof of a drug's efficacy. But news of a trial demonstrating some benefit for covid-19 patients from...

A just-reported Chinese study compares the clinical outcomes of COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine with those of patients receiving standard of care. The results, alas, are disappointing.I summarized that study in my roundup yesterday of COVID-19 therapeutic research, pointing out that this randomized controlled trial of 150 patients "found no difference in the rate of viral load reduction or symptom alleviation between the group treated with hydroxychloroquine and the one that had not been." Now the University of Vermont pulmonologist Josh Farkas has published his own analysis of the results, delving more deeply into the data.The patients in both arms...

The debate about “reopening the economy” is a phony debate. It’s phony because “the economy” isn’t shut down. Far from it. Walmart is still open. Dollar General is open. Amazon is open. Alibaba is open. It just so happens that the big-box mass merchandisers and online retailers responsible for flooding our country with crap from Communist China are open. Meanwhile, other, very specific parts of the country are shut down. Family-owned shops and workshops, the backbone of America, are closed. Fast-food franchises remain open—drive-through windows are operating at full tilt—but independently owned restaurants are shuttered or trying to survive at...

Ever since a “senior official in the Trump administration” penned an anonymous 2018 New York Times column attacking President Trump as unfit for office, Washington has been engrossed in a high-stakes whodunit. After an exhaustive investigation, the White House believes it’s cracked the case, identifying Trump's turncoat as his former deputy national security adviser, Victoria Coates, according to people familiar with the internal probe.

While we were sleeping, President Trump's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) gave H-1B and other visa holders a full 240 day extension to stick around and take new jobs for US citizens. When everyone was laid off or even fired over the past month, visa workers had 60 days to find new work or leave. Visa employers and groups pushing them as cheap alternative to American workers have been asking for 180 day extensions. The Trump administration just gave them 240 days! So much for the HIRE AMERICAN in Buy American, Hire...

Johns Hopkins University of Medicine’s Coronavirus Resource Center, as of April 13 at 7:02 a.m., reported 557,590 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus in the United States and 22,109 deaths due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. The current population of the United States, according to WorldOMeters.info, is just over 330 million. Do the math. That means 0.17 percent of America’s population has been infected by the coronavirus. That means 0.007 percent of America’s population has died from the coronavirus — we think.

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Donald Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to...

Trump ruined our economy and all for naught!" "Trump and his capitalism put millions out of work for nothing!" If you haven't already heard this from the "mainstream media" (AKA "fake news"), you soon will. Fake news media, doing the bidding of their leftist and Democrat masters, have been trying to destroy Donald Trump with hoaxes since he announced his candidacy, or maybe ever since Trump first questioned Barack Obama's claim of being born in the U.S. The fake news first claimed that President Trump overreacted to COVID-19, then Trump was belittling COVID-19 and ignoring the experts, then Trump didn't...

...The administration slapped the label on the Russian Imperial Movement...Officials said the Russian Imperial Movement has no ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but has not taken any action against the group. The group “has helped advance the Russian government’s external goals by recruiting Russian fighters to aid pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine.”...The organization justifies its actions as a way to bring Russia and the West back to the Christian faith. They make these moves because people have gone against God’s word.

What’s up with Dr. Brix’s modeling? Check this out https://t.co/kgg2gXB7fv— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) April 6, 2020 The IMHE model for the Wuhan coronavirus that the White House is relying on is garbage. It is using NY/NJ data and applying it to the rest of the U.S. It predicted that over 121,000 Americans would be hospitalized yesterday over the coronavirus. The actual number? 31,142. pic.twitter.com/vZCGXB5HLN— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 2, 2020

Until now, I have generally been reluctant to label Donald Trump the worst president in U.S. history. As a historian, I know how important it is to allow the passage of time to gain a sense of perspective. Some presidents who seemed awful to contemporaries (Harry S. Truman) or simply lackluster (Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush) look much better in retrospect. Others, such as Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, don’t look as good as they once did. So I have written, as I did on March 12, that Trump is the worst president in modern times — not of...

Donald Trump's top advisors have expressed doubts about the accuracy of the White House's apocalyptic forecast that 240,000 Americans will die from the coronavirus pandemic, sources have said. As the US death reached 6,056 Thursday and the nation's healthcare system buckles under the crisis, administration officials said the stark forecasts could have been a tactic to warn the president he needs to act now. The White House made the shock prediction Tuesday that there will be between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths in the US if the nation continues on its trajectory and current social distancing guidelines are maintained. Trump said...

Most coronavirus patients who end up on ventilators go on to die, according to several small studies from the U.S., China and Europe. And many of the patients who continue to live can't be taken off the mechanical breathing machines. "It's very concerning to see how many patients who require ventilation do not make it out of the hospital," says Dr. Tiffany Osborn, a critical care specialist at Washington University in St. Louis who has been caring for coronavirus patients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. That concern is echoed by Negin Hajizadeh, a pulmonary critical care doctor at the Donald and Barbara...

US authorities are now firing an opening salvo at China, claiming that the county misinformed the rest of the world about the severity of covid-19. And that better information would have spurred other nations to take the threat more seriously. That would perhaps make sense if it weren't such a crock of baloney. Anyone paying attention (like we here at PeakProsperity.com) could see sufficient signs by late January that the virus was extremely contagious, deadly, and had overwhelmed China's attempts to contain it. And yet US, and CDC officials continued to downplay its risks into early March. And, c'mon. Who...