Today, I'm starting with a correction last week in discussing a White House press secretary,
Kayleigh McEnany, claim that the odds of what happened in terms of the vote in four different
states were one in one quadrillion.
She also said the odds of that happening in four states is one in one quadrillion raised
to the fourth power.
I, with no explanation, said that's not how exponents work.
That was very unclear and really inaccurate in the context in which I said it.
If one in one quadrillion were the right numbers at the state level, raising it to the fourth
power would give us the combined probability.
In theory, that is how exponents work.
By not explaining, I may have not been clear and I apologize for that.
I will try to do better in the future.
Let's get on to the week's news.
It's a truly a tragedy what's going on in this country in general.
But I'm talking right now about coronavirus.
I get that we're a huge country geographically.
We have three hundred and thirty million people.
I get that.
But we are some of the worst of the worst in the world.
And we are now having a nine elevens worth of deaths on one day regularly.
And the numbers are potentially going to get much worse before they get any better.
Now, I know many people on the right, including Donald Trump, like to say, well, everyone
is seeing the same thing.
That could not be further from the truth.
And I want to examine that with you today because we really need to understand just
how terribly we are doing the claim.
Is everyone seeing the same thing.
Cases are spiking here, cases are spiking there.
Italy's, you know, Sweden, whatever.
That's mostly based on this spike in mid-October that we started seeing, just like many other
European countries.
But there are two really important differences to understand here.
The first is that when the U.S. started seeing its October spike, that was already our third
spike because we had Spike number one in April and Spike number two in July.
So middle of October, we're on spike number three.
That's a key difference because in Italy, for example, their mid-October spike was only
their second spike.
In other words, Italy successfully suppressed the virus throughout May, June, July, August,
September, early October.
So when we were entering Spike three and they were also spiking, they were only on their
second spike.
So that's a huge difference.
And that applies to just about all of these European countries that did not have the second
spike we had.
Just as importantly, these European countries that started getting a spike when we did in
mid-October.
Most of them have already suppressed the spike and they've seen a decline from the highs
of about 50 percent of new cases per day.
So as an example, we look at Spain and you see that, yes, Spain started having spike
number two at the same time that we started having a spike, number three.
But their trend line for the seven day case average is already down by half from where
it peaked.
If you look at another example like France, you also see that while they spiked in mid-October,
like we did there, cases are already way down.
But when you look at the United States, we have this spike that started at the same time,
but we are reaching new records just about every day.
This has been one of the biggest failures of any presidential administration ever.
It's globally shameful, but it is a tragedy in terms of its its toll on human life and
suffering.
And it's going to take time to fix this.
Now, there's no way around it.
And we know that on January 21st, every coronavirus death will be blamed on Joe Biden by these
Republicans.
All I care is that we fix it if now they want to start wearing masks and social distancing
because Biden's president then do it in order to show.
I don't know what I don't think that that's going to be the reaction.
And of course, it's too late for the three hundred thousand people that died already.
It's too late for the many that recovered from serious cases of the virus and still
have symptoms and unknown long term effects that we don't yet understand.
The good news is the FDA has approved an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer Bion tech
vaccine.
I've been saying Biogen tech, but someone told me it's beyond tech that is approved.
And we're going to talk about vaccination momentarily, December 17th, which is what
is that?
Thursday, the FDA will be meeting about the Moderna vaccine.
And we'll have more detailed report later in the week about that, if indeed it is approved.
And we'll talk more about vaccines momentarily.
But this is a cautionary tale about what not to do.
This is not about taking you know, it's so depressing.
Don Junior, early in this entire fiasco, said, oh, Democrats want people to die to make Trump
look bad.
No, I have not.
I've not found a single person.
On the left are a Democrat who wants people to die.
What we do want is that those responsible for the failed leadership be held accountable.
In a sense, Trump was because he lost the election.
But this is really a cautionary tale about what not to do.
And part of what not to do is don't elect a buffoonish and competent clown to be president
of the United States.
Let's talk about vaccination.