Civil Commotion

With responsibility for the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic shifted to the Department of Health and Human Services from Dr. Fauci’s Centers for Disease Control, infection data has — What do you know? — disappeared.

Previously public data has already disappeared from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website after the Trump administration quietly shifted control of the information to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Since the pandemic began, the CDC regularly published data on availability of hospital beds and intensive care units across the country. But Ryan Panchadsaram, who helps run a data-tracking site called Covid Exit Strategy, said that when he tried to collect the data from the CDC on Tuesday, it had disappeared.

Expect endless reassurance from the First Felon that, thanks to him, everything is great.

The same administration that scrubbed climate-change data off of government servers has ordered hospitals to stop sending Covid-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control.

The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.

The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

In view of the Trump administration’s indifference to facts and tendency toward glib denial of reality, it’s difficult to imagine that this serves any purpose but controlling the narrative; the government that is incompetent to mount a defense against the virus has decided to seize the data and mount a P.R. offensive.

The analogy is imperfect, but there is precedent for this sort of thing — Lysenkoism, in Russia. There, during the Stalin era, biologists who accepted evolution were fired, imprisoned, sometimes executed. Ideology mattered more than facts and science and, when applied to agriculture, it caused widespread starvation.

Kind of like the way that Happy Talk during a pandemic can cause tens of thousands of needless deaths.

The Trump virus must be exterminated and his supporters must be marginalized to the point where they can do no more damage.

Michael Hamar

Sounds familiar, no? Like me, Hamar is a former Republican sickened by what the GOP has become.

W-a-a-a-y back in the early 1960s, William F. Buckley, Jr., drove off the far-right fringe — the Birchers, the evangelical loonies, the Dr. Strangeloves. This is not to say that Buckley was somehow squishy on conservatism, a proto-RINO; after all, he thought Eisenhower was unacceptably liberal. He did know the difference between a conservative and a loon, however.

What do you know? Sixty years later the nutjobs have returned and captured the asylum, ruined the GOP, and put a very serious dent in the country. Now, once again, they must firmly be put out of polite society. The GOP must be annihilated, reduced to a memory, like the Whigs and the Bull Moose Party.

Dr. Jerry Coyne is blocked in Pakistan for publication of blasphemous material, below.

Famously, Socrates was executed in 399 B.C. for “corrupting the youth,” a story told in a series of four Platonic dialogues. The Hellenism that Socrates questioned has disappeared from the earth — but his arguments, when turned against Christianity and Islam, are no less fatal. Censorship won’t close the best minds and, more than 2-millennia later, you’d think the Godly would have figured that out.

“You are not your own, for you were bought with a price …” Bah. I am reminded of this famous passage from Galt’s Speech in Atlas Shrugged.

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors — between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

Though there is much that Ayn Rand was wrong about, she had a cleareyed view of religion: it is merely a tool for enslaving men.