The Coming Coronavirus Vaccine

Now that most Arab nations have abandoned the mindlessly self-destructive Palestinian cause the only people who still cling bitterly to it are Western leftists and other assorted proto-fascists. 

Middle Eastern Arab nations have discovered that, as we have often noted on this blog, Israel is the solution, not the problem.

Now, it turns out, an Israeli research institute is within months of developing a vaccine against the coronavirus.

The Jerusalem Post reports the good news:

Israeli scientists are on the cusp of developing the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus, according to Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis. If all goes as planned, the vaccine could be ready within a few weeks and available in 90 days, according to a release.

“Congratulations to MIGAL [The Galilee Research Institute] on this exciting breakthrough,” Akunis said. “I am confident there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” Akunis said, referring to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

For the past four years, a team of MIGAL scientists has been developing a vaccine against infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), which causes a bronchial disease affecting poultry. The effectiveness of the vaccine has been proven in preclinical trials carried out at the Veterinary Institute.

The scientists are the research institute are forging ahead to accelerate development:

“Given the urgent global need for a human coronavirus vaccine, we are doing everything we can to accelerate development,” MIGAL CEO David Zigdon said. The vaccine could “achieve safety approval in 90 days,” he said.

It will be an oral vaccine, making it particularly accessible to the general public, Zigdon said.

“We are currently in intensive discussions with potential partners that can help accelerate the in-human trials phase and expedite completion of final-product development and regulatory activities,” he said.

Ah yes, you will say, but what about the idiots in the BDS movement.

You know about the BDS movement. Supported by major members of the Democratic Party, it wants to declare economic warfare on Israel… by boycotting its products, divesting stock in its companies and sanctioning it. 

Will these idiot culture warriors boycott the new coronavirus vaccine?

The Daily Wire reports:

Online, pro-Israel voices quickly mocked those who support the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to destroy the state of Israel.

BDS this https://t.co/fmd0we8kPk

— Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer) February 27, 2020

Vox: The Zionist Plot To Brainwash People Through Vaccines, Explained https://t.co/iferuw64Yd

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) February 28, 2020

As if that were not bad enough, the Jerusalem Post recently reported that Israeli scientists have advanced research on a cure for cancer:

“We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets.

The potentially game-changing anti-cancer drug is based on SoAP technology, which belongs to the phage display group of technologies. It involves the introduction of DNA coding for a protein, such as an antibody, into a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria. That protein is then displayed on the surface of the phage. Researchers can use these protein-displaying phages to screen for interactions with other proteins, DNA sequences and small molecules.

“Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market,” Aridor said. “Our solution will be both generic and personal.”

You do not think that anyone would be so anti-Semitic that they would prefer sacrificing lives to doing business with Israel. You would be wrong.

When Capetown, South Africa was suffering a severe water shortage, the local officials discovered that they could alleviate the problem by building desalination plants. But then they discovered that the companies who had the most advanced desalination technology were Israeli. They called off the projects. Better to die of thirst than to do business with Jews.

Anyway, we will see how BDS warriors react when Israeli research produces a vaccine for the coronavirus. Or when Israelis come up with a new treatment for cancer.

I can promise you one thing: you not will not go broke underestimating the intelligence of the BDS movement.

What's in the Name: Corona?

It just shows you how well-educated Americas are. Now that the coronavirus may or may not be a pandemic, serious beer drinkers are avoiding Corona beer. 

What's in a name? Apparently, beer drinkers are not taking any chances.

Then again, a few intrepid souls are defying conventional wisdom. See previous post.

From The New York Post, via Hot Air (via Maggie's Farm):

A surprising 38 percent of beer drinkers insisted that they would not, under any circumstances, buy Corona as the deadly virus spreads across the globe, according to the survey conducted by 5W Public Relations.

“There is no question that Corona beer is suffering because of the coronavirus,” Ronn Torossian, founder of 5WPR, said in a statement.

There is no known similarity between the beer and the virus — except for the name.

But Torossian explained how important the name was to the product’s branding.

Bar Therapy

The Democratic Party's Patriotism Deficit

Analyzing the Bernie Sanders candidacy, Joseph Sternberg offers a comparison between Sanders and Britain’s biggest loser: Jeremy Corbyn.

He explains that however much the British people rejected Corbyn’s socialism and his bigotry, the more important point was that they saw Corbyn as less than patriotic. Corbyn lost because he was suffering a patriotism deficit. Brexit, I daresay, had become a patriotism issue:

Sternberg writes:

What British voters really, really didn’t like about Mr. Corbyn wasn’t his economics. It was his culture.

To a remarkable extent the December election wasn’t a vote on Brexit or socialism or Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s economic “leveling up” of poorer regions. It was a referendum on Mr. Corbyn’s Britishness: Does he have enough of it, yea or nay?

Nay, said voters in Labour’s traditional heartlands. Michael Ashcroft, a former Conservative deputy chairman and veteran pollster, this month released a postmortem on Labour’s campaign. His surveys and focus groups with former Labour voters who defected in 2019 are devastating.

“He is not patriotic,” one participant said of Mr. Corbyn. “He meets all those terrorist parties. You want someone with good old values.” Quoth another: “He said he would never press the [nuclear] button. We need protection. He should have said he would, even if he didn’t mean it.”

Among those who voted Labour in 2017 but not in 2019, the most common reason for switching allegiance, cited by 53%, was that they didn’t want Mr. Corbyn to be prime minister. That sentiment outranked Brexit as a motivation even among voters who defected to Mr. Johnson’s get-Brexit-done Conservatives by 75% to 73% (respondents could choose more than one option). These voters decided the election.

Unpatriotic and indecent… these were the words British people used to describe Corbyn:

Mr. Corbyn had given them ample reason for doubt: There was his tendency to pal around with terrorists who killed Britons or their allies. His indulgence of anti-Semitism in Labour’s ranks, which offended working-class Britons’ sense of decency. His disdain for alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and military programs such as the Trident nuclear deterrent, which give the U.K. its esteemed place in the world.

Similarly, American citizens have ample reason to see Sen. Sanders as lacking patriotism. It’s not just the socialist yearnings, it’s also the willful and even mindless clinging to nations and movements that hate America:

Mr. Sanders faces the same problem. No one who shares Middle America’s core values of freedom, democracy and entrepreneurship would choose to honeymoon in the Soviet Union. No one who values American achievements in science, the arts or education would heap praise on Cuba’s schools.

Surely, patriotism involves borders. Sanders, like most Democratic candidates, wants to open America’s doors to anyone who wants to come in. He wants to offer all manner of social services to people who are here illegally. He does not distinguish between Americans and non-Americans. Without such a distinction, you do not have a country. Without a country, there is no patriotism.

Sternberg suggested that the other Democratic candidates have managed to express “an undertone of patriotism.”

Every other Democratic candidate on a debate stage with Mr. Sanders has been able to communicate even the most fantastical policy ideas with an undertone of patriotism. Mr. Sanders alone sounds as if he wants to replace America rather than transform it.

Here, I disagree. The other candidates all want an open borders policy. They believe that Trump’s wall is a racist obscenity.

Moreover, the Democratic Party is still the party of Barack Obama. And Obama was anything but patriotic. When you apologize for the country you are manifesting shame, not pride.

True enough, Obama was more subtle than Sanders, but Donald Trump was able to use patriotism as an issue in the 2016 election because the Obama presidency had told Americans to be ashamed of their country and to believe that they had never achieved anything consequential.

The Obama presidency also trafficked the notion that America was built by criminals as a conspiracy against minorities. Thus was the country divided between oppressors and the oppressed. A divided country cannot inspire love or loyalty.

Being unpatriotic is the Obama legacy. We will see if the Democratic Party can overcome it. 

Annals of Socialized Medicine

The only thing you have to lose is your health care. It’s the promise of socialized medicine. Democrats are all offering free health care because their voters are incapable of understanding that free means less. In fact, it means a lot less.

At the CPAC convention yesterday a panel explained the pitfalls of socialized medicine. Matt Margolis reported.

Take Canada:

Author Dr. David Schneider, an orthopedic surgeon from Colorado, explained how with socialized medicine, wait times for care “are disastrous.” In Canada, the wait time to see a specialist is two years, and then another two years to get the procedure.

“People in this country would go crazy if you were told you had to wait four months,” he said.

He added that people travel from Canada to the United States in order to get timely health care. They do not travel from the United States to Canada for the same.

Dr. Schneider explained that if Princess Diana had had her accident in the United States she would be alive today. You see, the French socialized health care system, proposed as a role model, does not have trauma specialists.

Then he explained how Princess Diana would be alive today, if not for socialized medicine. “Princess Diana was in the car accident in France,” he explained. “They actually don’t have any trauma specialists in France.”

“For the first hour after that accident, she was still in that tunnel,” he continued. “And after an hour, they took her to a nearby hospital and she was alive for another three hours and they couldn’t control the bleeding from her pulmonary artery.”

Schneider explained that “there were no trauma-trained people there.”

He continued, “I really believe, knowing what I know about her care and comparing it to what Congressman Scalise had, Princess Diana would have lived had that accident happened here in America.”

A sobering thought for today.

They Removed His Vagina

Sadly, this headline is not from The Onion or the Babylon Bee. It really, really happened in Great Britain. 

Here is the headline, via Ace of Spades (via Maggie’s Farm):

Doctors suspended for removing transgender man's vagina without consent

Here is the story:

Two doctors had their licenses suspended after removing a transgender man's vagina in London without his consent, according to a report.

Dr. Marco Capece and Dr. Giulo Garaffa were found guilty in connection to the irreversible procedure on a transgender man -- who didn't discover until a week after the October 2016 surgery that his vagina was removed, Metro UK reported Tuesday.

The patient, who wasn’t identified, said that he went in for two other procedures in his gender assignment process -- a hysterectomy and a metoidioplasty, an operation that gave him a penis.

But he claims he never consented to the third procedure -- a vaginectomy -- that he received at Highgate Private Hospital.

Sad to say it, but you can’t make this stuff up.

Child Abandonment

This one takes your breath away. I will not claim that feminists will support the Carolyn Hax position, but most women who responded to her remarks are with her.

In her letter to Hax, a woman says that she is facing a difficult choice: should she pursue career advancement even if it means abandoning her baby? And, should she pursue an advanced degree if it means taking time off from work… when she is the family’s breadwinner?

Let’s be clear: we are talking about a mother caring for a baby. Hopefully, you do not need to read the research on the importance of a mother’s presence. Every parent knows how much it  matters. Every parent knows that it is not good for a mother to abandon her children. More so when the children are babies.

And, what about the fact that this woman, who is seriously considering abandoning her baby, is also the family breadwinner. If she runs off to do her degree program she will not just be depriving her baby of her care. She will presumably be impoverishing and immiserating both her husband and her baby.

So, to me this is an easy decision. See what you think. Here is the letter, unedited:

I have a hobby I'm passionate about, and that with a LOT of luck and hard work could someday become a career, or a side career. I also have a full-time job, a side gig, a husband and a baby, so I'm not exactly swimming in extra time or energy or money to dedicate to this hobby.

That said, I just got the news that I've been accepted to a short-term program that MIGHT help things along with this hobby-passion.

If I didn't have the jobs and the husband and the baby, it would be a no-brainer; I'd spend the money and attend the program. But I am having a hard time feeling okay about doing that under my actual circumstances.

I'm the main breadwinner. Taking unpaid time off from work and spending money to travel and attend the program is an extravagance. I don't want to be away from the baby for that long. And it feels rather self-indulgent to put that kind of effort toward something that in the long run might never go anywhere.

I owe the program a decision within a couple of days, and right now I'm feeling scattered and stressed and frankly sort of sad about it — wishing I hadn't been accepted at all, that sort of thing. Do you have any thoughts that might help me get my mind moving in a productive direction?

— Scattered and Stressed

Easy decision, you will say. Hurting your baby in order to pursue a hobby sounds like a genuinely bad idea. It sounds like the height of moral dereliction. If anything happens to her baby while she is away, how will she feel then? Presumably, her family will not be able to afford a full-time Nanny.

And also, as a couple of commenters noted, the woman says nothing about her husband’s opinion. Does he have an opinion? Does he have a right to an opinion? By the terms of this letter the woman is a completely self-involved, self-absorbed human monad. She answers to no one, but her love of her hobby. Seriously, a hobby? And she has no sense of her moral responsibility to a baby.

The shocking part is the Hax response. Hold on to your hat, here it comes:

Okay, you’ve given all the reasons not to go. Now say to yourself, “Dammit, I am going,” and figure it out. Like, this afternoon, on a yellow lined scribble pad, in to-do list form.

You owe yourself that.

You owe your family that, because feeling as if you can’t grab your big moment even just once is a soul-killer.

And you owe Life that, because it doesn’t throw us these opportunities every day, and it pouts when its efforts are ignored because we don’t want to pay the two dollars.

If you can’t, then you can’t. Oh, well. Sometimes the yellow scribble pad gives us bad news. And/or sometimes it shows us that we didn’t want to go as badly as we thought. But if all it will mean is for you and your husband to put up with some temporary discomforts, then, aren’t you going to regret not trying to make it work?

I am not sure why it falls to me, who has never been a mother, to explain the facts of life to these mothers. But, we are not talking about a temporary discomfort. We are talking about abandoning a baby. The fact does not register for the letter writer or for Hax.

I do not know what a true feminist would say, but seriously, this attitude did not well up from the depths of anyone’s soul. It came from somewhere. It shows what happens when you allow ideology to overcome your moral sense. 

It shows gross moral dereliction. I am not sure what will happen to her soul if she passes on the chance to pursue her hobby, but I am confident that if she abandons her baby, other women, her fellow mothers, will look upon her as a complete and utter disgrace.

The Democratic Party's Anti-Semitism

Today’s Democratic Party has made anti-Semitism respectable again. For that, no small number of Jewish Democrats, beginning with the party's leading donor, Michael Bloomberg, should be bowing their heads in shame.

The evidence begins with Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The Wall Street Journal editorializes:

... in the Charleston debate Tuesday night he was asked about the tweet and whether he would move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem. President Trump moved the Embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 after many years of bipartisan Congressional support for doing so that included Joe Biden.

“Let me just—the answer is, it’s something that we would take into consideration,” Mr. Sanders replied about the Embassy. Then he loaded up for the kicker: “I am very proud of being Jewish. I actually lived in Israel for some months. But what I happen to believe is that, right now, sadly, tragically, in Israel, through Bibi Netanyahu, you have a reactionary racist who is now running that country.”

And, most significantly, the other candidates said nothing:

Wow. The man who could be the next U.S. President calls the 14-year Prime Minister of America’s closest Middle East ally a racist. It’s true that Mr. Sanders is a profligate user of the “racist” label against people he dislikes, including Mr. Trump. But this was still what our friends at the New York Sun called “a breathtaking moment.” All the more so because none of the other Democratic candidates on stage spoke up to disagree.

You can also tell by the company that Sanders keeps.

These sympathies are part of Mr. Sanders’s long-time worldview, and he has collected advisers of similar mind. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is a Bernie backer known for her anti-Israel broadsides that caused House Democrats to rebuke her.

Matt Duss, a Sanders adviser who could run the National Security Council, has written that “Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination.” Mr. Duss scrapped with the American Jewish Committee, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League as a blogger for an affiliate of the left-wing Center for American Progress.

For more evidence of the Democratic Party's anti-Semitism we turn to Eli Lake:

 In 2016 Sanders said he would work to normalize U.S. relations with Iran, a regime that sponsors terrorists who kill Jews and Americans. In January, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren hosted a conference call with the National Iranian American Council, a group that supports the U.S.-Iran relationship in the same way AIPAC advocates for the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Then there is the Sanders campaign’s embrace of surrogates who support the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel itself, something Sanders has said he opposes. The most prominent is Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist who in December said Israel is built on the idea of Jewish supremacy. (Unsurprisingly, she applauded his decision to skip AIPAC.) Another Sanders surrogate is Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat who attacked her fellow Democrats last year, saying she “should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support for a foreign country,” meaning Israel. 

The list goes on. The Sanders campaign is a magnet for Americans who are hostile to both the Jewish state and those who support it.

Of course, it’s not just the Sanders campaign. It’s the Democratic Party, a political party that has failed to expel the anti-Semites in its midst. Then again, how could it do so: it idolizes Jeremiah Wright’s protege.

And, let’s nor forget, Michael Bloomberg was instrumental in empowering Congressional Democrats. He said nothing about the Sanders brand of anti-Semitism on the debate stage two days ago.

But, now, reports have it that Bloomberg will put his enormous wealth to work trying to destroy Bernie Sanders.

From Pajamas Media (via Maggie’s Farm):

It's going to get hot and dirty in the Democrats' primary race! It took them a while, but Mike Bloomberg's campaign has finally decided to come out swinging against Bernie Sanders. And you know what that means: hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent in a major effort to take down the socialist frontrunner.

CNBC reports that senior aides to Bloomberg's campaign have discussed the matter for some time, and are now prepared to go all-out. They plan a multipronged attack, including the publication of opposition research on the commie candidate. Of course, they'll also push out "digital attack ads on Sanders' record."

Bloomberg's campaign will also "attempt to highlight negative aspects of his record on race relations both as a congressman and senator." This part of the assault is basically payback for Sanders' criticism of Bloomberg because of the latter's past support for stop-and-frisk.

Will the Bloomberg campaign call out Sanders for his flagrantly anti-Semitic attitudes toward the Jewish state? Don’t hold your breath. Anti-Semitism has become part and parcel of the party’s political philosophy. 

Does Radical Islam Threaten America?

Politicians and pundits seem to believe that we have no business stationing troops in the Middle East. After all, President Obama never said that radical Islam was a threat to America and therefore, leaders on the left and the right have concluded that radical Islam is not a threat to America.

Some suggest that we need but wait until radical Islam becomes a clear and present danger to our country. And yet, as the Muslim world undergoes an overdue reformation, anyone who thinks that this will happen without violence has clearly been smoking the wrong kind of cigarettes. And anyone who thinks that the flood of Muslim refugees in Europe will not produce existential problems for our Western European allies is naive beyond imagination. 

To take a simple example, the government of Germany, led by the center right fool named Angela Merkel, has chosen to side with Iran against America. It has been hard at work trying to help Iran to overcome the burden of American sanctions. And it has refused, despite the efforts of our great ambassador, Richard Grenell, to denounce the terrorist network called Hezbollah.

The reason: the increasingly large number of Muslim voters, voters who are trying to impose their cultural values on the German nation. It’s the democracy, stupid!

Anyway, despite the protestations of politicians and pundits, the American public still sees the value in having a military presence in the Middle East. The following story comes to us from The Hill (via Maggie’s Farm):

Conducted just after the U.S. strike that killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, the polls show that a majority of Americans support maintaining (45 percent) or increasing (29 percent) the U.S. military presence in the Middle East; fewer than a quarter (24 percent) say reduce. This is fairly stable with opinion in 2018. Support for specific long-term military bases in the region has also grown since last asked in 2014, with majorities now saying the U.S. should have bases in Iraq (55 percent, up from 41 percent in 2014) and Kuwait (57 percent, up from 47 percent in 2014). Nearly as many Americans back keeping bases in Afghanistan (48 percent, up from 43 percent in 2014), with support in each instance cutting across partisan lines.

The grounds are national security:

Asked which region is most important to the security interests of the United States, 61 percent of Americans name the Middle East, up from a plurality of 50 percent in 2018. No other region comes close, including Europe (15 percent), Asia (12 percent), Latin American (7 percent), and Africa (1 percent).

While woke politicians have their knickers in a twist over white supremacy, the American public considers the terrorist threat from radical Islam to be more significant:

Since 1998 when the Chicago Council first started asking about the threat from international terrorism, it has ranked as one of the highest threats. Sixty-nine percent of Americans called international terrorism a critical threat in 2019, making the fear second only to concern about cyberattacks. 

And the public seems to understand that stationing troops around the world serves as a deterrence. This comes on a day when the Trump administration has sent sending more troops to Saudi Arabia, to help deter a possible Iranian attack:

 Majorities of Americans say that maintaining U.S. military superiority (69 percent), participating in military alliances (74 percent), and stationing troops in allied countries (51 percent) make the United States safer. The fact that far fewer say that intervening militarily (27 percent) makes the United States more safe indicates that they see the U.S. military presence in the region as a way to prevent threats primarily through deterrence rather than through combat.

The Wall Street Journal has reported on the new American troops in Saudi Arabia:

Nearly 17 years after U.S. troops largely pulled up stakes from the kingdom, the U.S. is now back in force.

Here in a base of tents in the desert about 60 miles southeast of Riyadh, some 2,500 U.S. military personnel are launching F-15 fighter jets in soaring arcs overhead and manning Patriot missile batteries in shifts. Or they play chess and video games to pass the hours, with an NFL-themed video game splashed on a flat-screen TV inside a recreation tent.

The return of the U.S. troops—after maintaining a much smaller footprint for nearly two decades—reflects the alarm of Saudi and American leaders at the current threat posed by another regional power: Iran.

"We face a thinking enemy that is playing a real regional conflict for keeps, and they’re very good,” said Gen. John Walker, the commander of the 378th Air Expeditionary Wing at the base.