🌊 The “Fringe” New Leader of the NIH

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.

Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate – 2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.

Its interesting to me about the transgender mice thing, because my anti-trump social feed is full of people talking about Transgenic mice vs transgender mice and how clearly Trump is dumb.. But according to your research, he spoke factually... 8M dollars went into research on making mice transgender. Do i care ? No. Is it worthwhile research ? Maybe ? I am not an expert and would need more information to make a determination. I still disagree with DOGE blindly cutting programs just based on their political views (anti-trans, anti-lgbtqia, etc).

In reference to the 5 year initiative in Myanmar to help their population pursue higher education - I respectfully ask why? We have so many problems here in America - why are we investing in Myanmar right now? We have underserved, severely poor populations and we have our own underprivileged people who might want to pursue higher education - why is America looking outside its borders? I think this is how many here in the USA feel right now - let's fix what's going inside our borders and then we can look outside the country to help others.

Loved today’s article! I am not a Trump supporter by any stretch of the imagination and when I heard some of these statements I instantly rolled my eyes (as well as chuckled in agreement to some of them… I have heard of Lesotho but ONLY because of Roca globe trotter on the app). It was so helpful seeing the facts of what exists rather than just writing Trump off as being crazy — which he makes easy to do. And to give Trump credit — for the most part these do seem to be things that existed + not necessarily hyperbole. 

My big questions though are: Why were some of these things started/funded by the US government in the first place? Are these even effective programs? Are they even wanted in where they are being implemented? How much are we spending on things that impact everyday Americans? What are those things? 

I honestly feel like I lack a good understanding of why it could be important for the US to be (for example) “funding social cohesion in Mali”. Is this because we are good global citizens? How do you even achieve something like this? I don’t want to judge these things rashly + am genuinely interested in hearing what supporters say about their importance (and more importantly — their effectiveness). 

There probably ARE important and beneficial things being cut alongside excessive and wasteful things, and that we aren’t even scratching the surface... We are looking at millions of dollars which sounds like a lot to everyday people but we do have to keep in the mind these are drops in the bucket of the grand scheme of government spending. This makes me begin to question…what are other maybe bigger expenditures being hidden? What’s the real agenda that all of these smaller ones are providing distractions for? 

I didn’t vote for Trump but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t make some points that get you to just stop and think about things a little bit more and say “why?”. I think it’s good to question things— and that the mainstream media + former government establishment have forgotten that we should be asking questions. They should have answers and if their answers aren’t satisfactory — that’s not on us as voters/citizens, that’s on them.