Free Republic

Truth often sounds like fiction, especially when it does not fit the listener’s model of the world and what they believe to be in the realm of possibility. If you lived in Germany in 1933, you might hear news the new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, was arresting political opponents and putting them in a newly built prison. Unless you knew those people personally, you might dismiss the news as a conspiracy theory designed to hurt Hitler. Later, in November of 1938, when you heard the news of Jews being rounded up and sent to the same prison, you might dismiss it...

The CDC took nearly two years to formally recognize distinctions between masks for mitigating COVID-19 spread, finally saying in January that cloth masks offer "the least" protection and N95 respirators, which meet strict federal standards, "the highest." The agency's slight nod to the largely symbolic value of cloth masks, predominantly worn in school settings, followed months of calls by onetime White House COVID advisers, among others, to promote masks actually designed to stop aerosolized transmission. It also spurred a run on N95s, sending prices skyward. But a new peer-reviewed, randomized controlled trial (RCT) of N95s versus surgical masks, considered the...

Masks aren’t required on U.S. flights for now after a federal judge lifted a nationwide mask mandate covering planes and other forms of public transportation, though the Department of Justice is filing an appeal to overturn the decision after a request from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The lifting of the mask mandate has led some people on social media to express their concerns for immunocompromised passengers. Some medical experts, including Leana Wen, M.D., a public health professor at George Washington University and CNN medical analyst, have previously said that “one-way masking,” where someone is wearing a...

We all knew this was coming. The same people who were wrong for over a year about the power of surgical masks — at a very painful cost to our children and society — are now seamlessly pivoting to their new position without ever apologizing for their original mistakes. They now want children to wear the even more cruel N95 masks. The twisted irony is that after causing more discomfort and potential medical harms to children, they will still not provide protection against the virus. Like a dog returning to his vomit, Scott Gottleib, a former FDA administrator under Obama,...

COVID-19: It’s all we talk about, on the cable news, and in our 6-foot socially-distanced prison walks around our silent neighborhoods. And in nearly every conversation comes the intellectual shrug, “who could have seen this coming?” A single phrase that neatly absolves governments and experts alike of any responsibility of predicting the pandemic and, if not being able to stop it, at least cushioning its blow........ But is it unfair to engage in so much 20-20 hindsight? After all, who could see COVID coming? Well, we did. We — as in nodes within the U.S. Government tasked with tracking critical...

Newly resurfaced footage of then-President George W. Bush urgently warning of the risks posed by pandemics in 2005 -- "If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare," Bush said at the National Institutes of Health -- has drawn belated praise from his detractors, and raised new questions as to the state of the federal government's disaster preparedness since his administration. In particular, a USA Today fact-check recently confirmed that the Obama administration had allowed the N95 mask stockpile to deplete following a series of crises, and apparently ignored calls for experts to renew...

The head of Florida's Division of Emergency Management has accused U.S. mask manufacturer 3M of shipping the critical protective equipment to foreign countries who outbid U.S. buyers -- even as hospitals and state officials desperately scramble to secure N95 protective masks for healthcare workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. Jared Moskowitz told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Thursday that he discovered that 3M distributors were prioritizing foreign buyers after they refused to sell him the essential equipment. "For the last several weeks, we have had a boiler room chasing down 3M authorized distributors [and] brokers representing that they sell the...

ll. What started as an early morning call with a friend to help get N95 masks to hospitals in desperate need turned into a roller coaster of contacts in a frenzied, pandemic-driven market. For the next 10 hours, I sat in on calls between brokers selling masks and potential buyers, watching the psychology of market pressures play out in real time as millions of masks changed hands in a matter of hours. The buyers—from state government purchasing departments and hospital systems representing facilities throughout the Northeast, Midwest and California—expressed desperation for masks to protect their healthcare workers, but in the...

The national shortage of N95 respirator masks can be traced back to 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, when the Obama administration was advised to replenish a national stockpile but did not, according to reports from Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times. The Trump administration is scrambling to replenish a stockpile of protective medical gear for healthcare workers and patients as the coronavirus sweeps across the nation. N95 respirator masks are one of the most needed medical supplies amid the outbreak. The George W. Bush administration published the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza plan in 2005, which called...

I can’t remember ever seeing this much global panic about a virus. The bird flu outbreak that we witnessed a number of years ago definitely shook people up, and the ebola scare received a lot of attention for a short period of time, but this coronavirus pandemic is already on an entirely different level. Despite the fact that there is an impeachment trial happening in Washington right now, this pandemic has dominated headlines day after day, and many experts are warning that what we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg. It appears that this virus...

Demand for the disposable masks grows as avian flu threat continues to creep westward. The N95 masks are considered one of the first lines of defense in protecting health-care workers from airborne viruses such as SARS and tuberculosis. As avian flu continues to march westward, 3M Co. and other manufacturers of disposable respirator masks that could help contain an outbreak of the disease are racing to keep ahead of demand. Maplewood-based 3M is running at full capacity to fill orders for its N95 masks, but some customers complain that they can't get their orders fast enough. Gwilym McGrew, CEO of...