News from the dark side.

Published last week in The Lancet, the large-scale study suggested the malaria drugs could be dangerous to people with severe cases of Covid-19, increasing the risk of abnormal heart rhythms and even death.

Now, scientists across the world are asking the research team, led by Harvard professor Dr Mandeep Mehra, to release its data for further analysis and independent academic review.

In an open letter, they’ve asked the journal to provide details about the massive hospital database – consisting of 96,000 Covid-19 patients across six continents – which was the basis for the observational study.

So far the authors have declined to release their underlying data, which scientists worry carries several inconsistencies.

Among them are concerns the average daily doses of hydroxychloroquine, which is cheap and easy to administer, used were higher than the recommended amounts – and that data from Australian patients does not match data from the Australian government.

Just like trials done without the administration of Zinc along with Hydroxychloroquine, or the administration of the drug too late to do any real good.

After having done this for a lifetime, I can confidently say the following.  When an analyst refuses to release the data or math models for independent review and verification, he’s lying.

Period.  End of discussion.

Edit: More.  And more.

Via WiscoDave, who sends this from TTAG.

Share widely: National guard and MPD sweeping our residential street. Shooting paint canisters at us on our own front porch. Yelling “light em up” #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #JusticeForGeorge #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/bW48imyt55

— Tanya Kerssen (@tkerssen) May 31, 2020

Wow.  That’s really smart.

I have nothing detailed at the moment.  Lot’s of stuff in the pipeline, maybe.  Or maybe not.

So here’s my questions to the rioters.  Where were you, oh self righteous pricks, when open carry fishermen in Florida were body slammed by cops?

Where were you, oh self righteous rioters, when innocent former Marine Jose Guerena was raided and killed in his own home, having the trigger discipline never even to fire a shot in return?

Where were you this morning when the Supreme Tyrants declared that California, and thus any state, could prohibit Christians from worshiping?

Oh, I see.  Rights for some, but not for others.

Be careful folks.  Don’t align yourself with people who would take those very cops they hate so much and turn them on you to confiscate guns if they had the chance.  Don’t align yourself with people who would force Christians into hiding because of their own hatred for us.

BLM and Antifa couldn’t care less about your rights as a Christian or gun owner.

Decision in the dead of the night.

The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement. Our Constitution principally entrusts “[t]he safety and the health of the people” to the politically accountable officials of the States “to guard and protect.” Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 38 (1905). When those officials “undertake[ ] to act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties,” their latitude “must be especially broad.” Marshall v. United States, 414 U. S. 417, 427 (1974). Where those broad limits are not exceeded, they should not be subject to second-guessing by an “unelected federal judiciary,” which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people. See Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 545 (1985).

Meanwhile, the religion of “Home repair and lawn maintenance” remains unabated, with my local Lowe’s and Home Depot parking lots filled to capacity and wall-to-wall people in the aisles.

Welcome to the FUSA.  We have to be medical providers and professionals in order to interpret the first amendment to the constitution.  We’ll leave that to the bureaucracy.

Remarkable decision, with Roberts proving where his fealty lies.

SARS-CoV-2 remains a troublesome virus for some small fraction of patients, mostly the elderly and those with co-morbidity.

I’ve followed this channel for a long time.  The elderly are especially at risk.  This means that Cuomo and Whitmer did all the wrong things by forcing nursing homes and assisted living centers to accept Covid patients.  But we knew that already.

For those who are interested.  Doctors are still learning treatment protocols for this disease.  You can thank Fort Detrick, Anthony Fauci, gain-of-function research and the Wuhan virology lab for all of this.

Do you recall that I said this?

Next up, the wearing of masks.  I have some experience in air filtration engineering from my early career testing and balancing HEPA filters and charcoal adsorbers.  HEPA filters (of concern here) work by particle interception due to electrostatic force.  Surgical masks, cloths, handkerchiefs, and other manner of cotton material (cotton is cellulose) do not have that.

My daughter wears one in surgery and the ER to prevent potential blood-borne pathogens from entering her mouth, not to prevent SARS-CoV-2, flu or the common cold (which is also a Coronavirus).  N95 masks are just that, 95% efficient for particles down to a given size.  Moreover, when a nuclear or chemical worker wears a full face respirator, if the wearer is a male and has a beard, he must shave.  Workers have tried to create work-arounds for this by glazing their face with Vaseline, but the seal never works.  The bulk of breathing air goes around the filtration media if there is no testable seal, not through it.  This is true of full face respirators, and it is true in the superlative for these silly little masks half of America is wearing.

When you put an N95 mask on, the bulk of your breathing air is going under and over the top of the mask, not through it.  Furthermore, every decontamination technique eventually destroys the electrostatic charge on the fibers, thus rendering the mask useless.  It’s designed to be worn and then thrown away.  It’s actually worse than useless, because we are now learning that there is a heavy viral and pathogenic loading on both the outside and the inside of the filter media, and we also now know that the degree to which a patient suffers from this disease is a function – at least partially – of the amount of inoculate that you breath.

Then I got a little more detailed and discussed particle sizes.

HEPA filters will remove particles down to 0.3 µm in size (to usually 99.95% efficiency, depending upon the filter – here I have used data for nuclear grade filters).  The SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80 nm in diameter.  A few viruses out of a million might be intercepted by electrostatic force, but that’s essentially zero.

If the particle you’re trying to intercept is spittle, stay away from coughing people anyway.  But those particles drop by sedimentation, diffusiophoresis, etc.

0.3 µm versus 80 nm.  A nanometer is 1E-9 meters, and 1 µm is 1E-6 meters.  This means that a SARS-CoV-2 virus is 80E-9 / 0.3E-6 = 0.27 the minimum size necessary for even the most expensive nuclear grade HEPA filters to remove it from an air stream.

I need to caveat these statements and observe that because of the serpentine flow of air through a HEPA filter, it’s possible that there is some removal efficiency due to electrostatic force (i.e., that it’s not zero), assuming a charge on the shell of the virus.  But it’s still low.  While I’m not perfect, I won’t mislead readers.  And while there is some small probability that there will be some small effect, any very small particulate eventually re-evolves into the air stream.

One of my major gripes with how America has turned to the medical bureaucracy during this pandemic is treating medical doctors like experts in every field of science.  They’re not.  A doctor isn’t an air flow and filtration engineer.  A doctor isn’t an industrial hygienist.  A doctor isn’t a physicist.

But it’s still nice to see that eventually they conform to the truth of what science tells us.  This is straight from the New England Journal of Medicine (nejmp2006372).

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

You can read the rest for yourself.  They eventually dive into a discussion concerning the use of masks by medical workers, and I think over-state their case (I still believe, along with my daughter, an NP, that she wears a mask for purposes of protecting herself from blood-borne diseases and spittle in the OR and ER).

However, nits here and there shouldn’t obfuscate the fact that at least they are being honest about this.  Anxiety is the root of the problem, and reflexive fealty to the priesthood of the medical profession is a symptom of real problems in America concerning the lack of STEM education and knowledge.

Here, and David Codrea also has video.

However, you’d better watch yourself.  The cops don’t like it one bit.  How do I know this?

Rieple’s arrest came after Libor Jany, a journalist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reported, via a police source, that Rieple had shot and killed a suspected looter at his business. Police confirmed in their first press conference on the shooting that they were investigating the theory that the owner of the Cadillac Pawn & Jewelry store shot a suspected looter, but they said they were also investigating other theories they wouldn’t describe. Police spokesman John Elder confirmed at midnight that one person was in custody and one person was dead but named neither.

Elder also said he believes Minnesota’s “duty to retreat” law means a businessowner doesn’t have a right to defend their property with lethal force because it’s not their home. You can read more about the duty to retreat law here.

Records obtained by Heavy show that John Richard Rieple, 59, of Galesville, Wisconsin, is being held in the Hennepin County jail.

In a state like that, if a thug comes in to steal your property, you have to retreat and let them do it.  In other words, you have to trust that stealing is all they really intend to do.

Make sure of the laws in your state, and be prepared to do – or not to do – whatever is necessary to do what it is you intend to do.

In other words, don’t back yourself into a legal corner you can’t get out of.

Sorry to the 300 BO boys, but I’m not impressed at all.  It’s not a “hot” .45 ACP to me.  It’s 205 grains instead of 230 grains, and .45 ACP can be gotten hotter (450 SMC, at 1120 FPS).  Also, Lucky Gunner almost always gets expansion in .45 ACP.

So do a lot of other people.  But Shannon wants to make it abundantly clear.