_-

—

NY Governor promises to delay Vaccine for COVID if Trump still President!!

NEWS

Cuomo’s COVID-19 vaccine comments ‘unconscionable’: HHS Secretary Azar

By Ebony Bowden and Bernadette Hogan

November 9, 2020 | 2:06pm

WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Monday called New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s threats to block the distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine in the Empire State “absolutely unconscionable.”

In an interview with Fox News on Monday morning, Azar also said that it was Cuomo, not President Trump, who was in charge of distributing the vaccine in New York.

“It’s just absolutely unconscionable that somebody would want to delay a vaccine to the American people that’s safe and effective just for political partisan reasons,” Azar said after Cuomo earlier Monday called a Pfizer breakthrough on a vaccine “bad news.”

“Here’s the really interesting thing, Operation Warp Speed is working very closely with Gov. Cuomo’s health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker and his team, because guess who’s actually in charge of distributing within any state? The governor is,” Azar continued.

In an interview with “Good Morning America” on Monday, Cuomo blasted Trump’s vaccine plan as “flawed” and went so far as to declare: “We can’t let this vaccination plan go forward the way that Trump and his administration is designing it.”

“The bad news is that it’s about two months before Joe Biden takes over, and this means [the Trump] administration is going to be implementing a vaccine plan,” Cuomo said.

Pfizer announced overnight that its COVID-19 vaccine is more than 90 percent effective at fighting the infection, a milestone in the global fight against the pandemic.

But Cuomo has repeatedly threatened to slow-roll the distribution of any vaccine developed under the Trump administration, claiming the process was “politicized” and vowing to create a review board to double-check any federally approved treatment.

While Pfizer has signed on to Operation Ward Speed, the Trump administration’s plan to fast-track delivery of a COVID-19 vaccine, the company did not take any money from the federal pot to help pay for research and development.

Nick Langworthy, the chairman of the New York State Republican Party, told The Post the comments were “reckless” and said people’s lives could be put at risk for the sake of scoring a political point.

“The governor’s comments are reckless, baseless, irresponsible and will cost lives. He should be ashamed of himself for holding the lives of New Yorkers hostage to score a cheap political point,” he said.

“Our world-class military is handling the distribution and they are supremely capable — if he’s looking for incompetence he should look in the mirror, Langworthy added, a veiled jab at Cuomo’s handling of the deadly nursing home crisis.

But Gareth Rhodes, a member of Cuomo’s COVID-19 Response Task Force, said the governor’s office was concerned that distribution through pharmacies and hospitals would be inadequate and feared it would take 20 months to vaccinate the entire state at the same rate of the flu vaccine.

“The existing flu infrastructure is insufficient,” Rhodes told The Post on Monday, adding that poor communities of color would be left out.

When pressed on who was responsible for distributing a successful vaccine, the governor’s office or the Trump administration, Rhodes said that remained unclear and stressed that New York, like many other states across the nation, was broke.

<img class="i-amphtml-intrinsic-sizer" role="presentation" src="data:;base64,” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />

“This is going to be extraordinarily expensive. The federal government hasn’t given the state and local governments any type of aid that we need to make up for our budget revenue. All these states are broke,” he said.

“We’ve asked over 35 questions that would help us understand the delineation of federal and state responsibility. There are many unknowns,” he went on.

“What we do know so far is that the federal government’s plan doesn’t take into account the need for states to be able to go beyond the existing infrastructure and that is why we are calling, even repeatedly calling, the federal government to put forward the funding and have the type of visionary approach that recognizes that that you can’t just use the existing flu vaccine infrastructure,” he said.

Responding to Cuomo’s latest remarks that Trump’s distribution plan was “flawed,” Azar suggested that Cuomo was out of touch with his own health experts.

“His team is doing a really good job of working with us and his team can set up a distribution system and a prioritization within their state,” Azar said.

When asked if other governors were trying to stop distribution under this president, the HHS secretary said Cuomo was alone.

——

I found this article below from “Reason Magazine” very thought provoking

Deliberately Infect Healthy Young People To Test Coronavirus Vaccines, Propose Bioethicists

An idea that could really speed up vaccine development

RONALD BAILEY | 3.27.2020 5:30 PM

U.S. military physician Walter Reed and his medical colleagues famously had mosquitoes bite volunteers in order to establish that the disease was in fact borne by the flying pests. This finding was the basis of successful mosquito control efforts to reduce the incidence of the disease in tropical areas. The volunteers in these experiments were paid $200 to participate and $500 if they contracted yellow fever. These substantial payments, made in gold, would amount to approximately $8,000 and $20,000 respectively in today’s dollars.

Now Rutgers University bioethicist Nir Eyal and his colleagues are proposing something like Reed’s “human challenge” study as a way to speed up the development of a vaccine against the novel coronavirus that is responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The idea is that vaccine developers can cut more directly to what is essentially a phase three clinical trial. In phase three, vaccines already tested for safety are generally given to a large group of folks who are at risk of the targeted infection and monitored for a considerable period of time to see how many of the vaccinated people actually come down with the disease versus a group of unvaccinated people.

As Eyal explains in Nature, the proposed idea would “gather a group of people at low risk from any exposure—young and relatively healthy individuals—and ensure that they are not already infected. You give them either the vaccine candidate or a placebo and wait for enough time for an immune response. And then you expose them to the virus.” So instead of waiting around for the virus to find (vaccinated and unvaccinated) folks in the wild as researchers do in regular phase three trials, you speed things up by bringing the virus to them.

Setting aside the misery of illness, the risk of death rate for folks under age 50 is about 1 in 200. Eyal argues that such a trial would be ethical on the grounds that we allow people to engage in risky activities all of the time such as volunteering for emergency medical services that increase their risks of exposure. In addition, volunteers in the trial who are being carefully monitored for the disease would likely be safer than folks relying on the general health care system to treat them.

The authors argue that such human challenge studies, by accelerating vaccine evaluation, could reduce the global burden of coronavirus-related mortality and morbidity. If both test subjects and researchers volunteer to take this on, let’s do it.

Milton Friedman on Donahue – 1980 (First Appearance)

Related posts:

I am moving the FRIEDMAN FRIDAY to a monthly feature on http://www.thedailyhatch.org. My passion has been recent years to emphasize the works of Francis Schaeffer in my apologetic efforts and most of those posts are either on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: THE MIND BEHIND THE REPUBLICAN TAX REVOLT

The on-going debate over raising the debt ceiling has focused on many areas of disagreement between Democrats and Republicans but none bigger than the Republican determination not to raise taxes.  Many pundits credit this to the political power of Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform who have spent years collecting “No Tax Increase” pledges from Republican candidates.  Others attribute Republican intransigence on taxes to a near religious belief in supply side economics, a school of thought founded by economist Arthur Laffer and journalist Jude Wanniski in the late 1970s.

The true seeds of this attitude toward tax increases, in my view, actually go back farther and can be traced to an even nobler pedigree.  The real inspiration for this conviction comes from the late Nobel prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman.  It is only by understanding Friedman’s reasoning and his values that one can fully understand why Republican refuse to see spending cuts and tax increases as simply two sides of the same budget-balancing coin.

This was not always the Republican, or even the conservative, position.  During the 1950s, it was Democrats who advocated tax cuts to stimulate the economy and President Eisenhower who insisted “we can never justify going further into debt to give ourselves a tax cut at the expense of our children.”

In 1964, the eventual Republican nominee for president, Senator Barry Goldwater, voted against the so-called Kennedy tax cuts (actually passed after Kennedy’s assassination the previous year) because he was convinced the resulting deficits would be inflationary.  Even after losing the presidential election to President Lyndon Johnson in a landslide later that year, Goldwater predicted a Republican comeback, telling U.S. News & World Report that a no-win war in Vietnam and high inflation would prompt a backlash against the Democrats two years later (he was right on both counts).

So if Eisenhower and Goldwater represented Republican orthodoxy in the 1950s and ‘60s, what happened?  In large part, it was an intellectual revolution in conservative/libertarian thought prompted by economist Milton Friedman.  While Friedman rejected the simplistic Keynesian (and later supply-side) notion that tax cuts automatically stimulate the economy, he believed that higher taxes were bad because they led to more and bigger government, which he was convinced at best led to waste and at worse to greater government control over our economy, our lives and our freedoms.

In 1967, three year’s after the Kennedy tax cuts, the Johnson Administration was already running huge deficits thanks to the a combination of Great Society social programs and the Vietnam War.  Writing in his regular Newsweek column on August 7, 1967, Friedman expresseded his concern that this would soon lead to higher taxes, using an analysis that would become familiar to his readers over the years:

“.If we adopt such programs, does not fiscal responsibility at least call for imposing taxes to pay for them?  The answer is that postwar experience has demonstrated two things. First, that Congress will spend whatever the tax system will raise—plus a little (and recently, a lot) more.  Second, that, surprising as it seems, it has proved difficult to get taxes down once they are raised.  The special interests created by government spending have proved more potent than the general interest in tax reduction.

“If taxes are raised in order to keep down the deficit, the result is likely to be a higher norm for government spending. Deficits will again mount and the process will be repeated.”

Sure enough, a year later a 10% income tax surcharge was enacted by Congress to cut the deficit and fight inflation.  His prediction having been confirmed, Friedman returned to the subject in another Newsweek column dated July 15, 1968.  He now described a familiar pattern of how Democrats used the traditional view of fiscal conservatism to convince Republicans to help pay for the Democrats’ own profligate spending:

“The standard scenario has been that the Democrats—in the name of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, or the Great Society—push through large spending programs . . . generally against the opposition of the Republican leadership.  The spending programs not only absorb the increased tax yield generated by the ‘fiscal drag,’ they go farther and produce deficits.

“The Democrats then appeal to the Republicans’ sense of fiscal responsibility to refrain from cutting tax rates or, as in this case, to raise them.  The Republicans cooperate, thereby establishing a new higher revenue base for further spending.  The Democrats get the ‘credit’ for the spending; the Republicans, the ‘blame’ for the taxes; and you and I pay the bill.”

Fast forward seven years, when Republican President Gerald Ford was proposing a tax cut to stimulate the economy during a brief recession.  As an economist who believed monetary, not fiscal, policy was the best way to keep the economy on a stable path to growth, Friedman did not believe the proposed tax cut would have its intended stimulatory effect.  He explained why in another Newseek column on July 15, 1975 but went on to say:

“Yet I must confess that I favor tax cuts—not as a cure for recession but for a very different reason.  Our basic long-term need is to stop the explosive growth in government spending.  I am persuaded that the only effective way to do so is by cutting taxes—at any time for any excuse in any way.

“The reason is that government will spend whatever the tax system raises plus a good deal more—but not an indefinite amount more.  The most effective way to force each of us to economize is to reduce our income.  The restraint is less rigid on government, but it is there and seems to be the only one we have.

“So hail the tax cut—but let’s do it for the right reason.”

Another six years went by and now it was the newly-elected president, Ronald Reagan, who was proposing a large, multi-year tax cut to get the economy moving. At the time, he was also proposing off-setting spending cuts (which we all know didn’t happen).  Friedman wrote yet another Newsweek column dated July 27, 1981, refuting objections to the plan by liberal economists while also discounting many of the claims of supply-siders in the Reagan Administration.  Friedman still supported the tax cuts, of course, and explained why liberals were suddenly worried about deficits:

“The analysis so far treats government spending and taxes as if they were two independent entities.  They clearly are not.  We know full well that Congress will spend every penny—and more—that is yielded by taxes.  A cut in taxes will mean a cut in government spending.  And there is no other way to get a cut in spending.

“That is the real reason why the big spenders and the big inflationists of the past have suddenly been converted to fiscal conservatism and to preaching the virtues of fighting inflation.  They know that a multi-year tax cut will force multi-year spending reductions.  They hope that a one-year tax cut will quiet public agitation and allow them to revert next year to their high-spending ways.”

Taken as a whole, these excerpts from columns written for a popular magazine by a Nobel laureate economist between 1967 and 1981—44 to 30 years ago—spell out precisely the philosophy that today motivates many Republicans in and out of Congress to firmly oppose any tax increase as part of a deficit reduction or budget-balancing plan proposed by Democrats.

Like Milton Friedman, they are firmly convinced that any taxes they raise will ultimately result in increased government spending.  They believe government spending necessarily translates into more and bigger government.  They believe the federal government is already too big, threatening not just the health of the economy but their freedom and way of life as well.

One can argue with Friedman’s assumptions as well as the conclusions he draws from them.  But until those on the other side—including the President, Democratic congressional leaders and the media—understand the reasoning and motivations behind the anti-tax sentiments of Republicans from Capitol Hill to the Tea Party activists, it’s hard to imagine anything more than a temporary truce in the battle being waged over the budget.

Low State Taxes help States grow and

Related posts: