Trump wants to reopen America — here’s how

The opinions of medical experts are important — but no one elected them to lead America through this crisis. They elected Donald Trump. It’s time for him to trust his political instincts again.  

President Trump emphasized over the weekend that it’s time for America to hang out the “Open For Business” sign again. “We have to get back to work. We have to open our country again,” the president said repeatedly and emphatically at a coronavirus press conference at the White House.

My sense is that the president is about to lose his patience with all of his medical experts, who want to keep America under lock and key until the very last individual virus has been cornered in some out of the way place and put out of our misery. But he knows America can’t wait that long if there is going to be a country and an economy left to save. Trump understands this stay-at-home policy his health experts are foisting on him is doing more harm to America than the virus ever could. The cure is rapidly becoming worse than the disease.

Trump wants to reopen America — here's how

The opinions of medical experts are of course important, but no one elected them to lead the nation through this crisis. They elected Donald Trump. It’s time for him to trust his political instincts again.

Let’s not forget that Dr. Fauci, whom everyone seems to believe is the Oracle at Delphi when it comes to coronavirus, told us on January 21 that “this is not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.” This is the same guy who now, today, doesn’t want anybody to go outside their houses for months on end. That bobbing and weaving does not exactly inspire confidence.

Thanks to advice from the worry-warts at the CDC, we have seen an alarming implosion of basic constitutional rights at the hands of our techno-tyrants. Church services, weddings, and even funerals have been stopped under threat of arrest. Like they were making a drug raid, police surrounded a church in Baltimore which was meeting with just 10 people in perfect conformity with the edict of the governor. There were more cops than parishioners at the church. Violations of so-called “voluntary” house arrests are now carrying penalties of up to five years in jail and a $5000 fine. I heard this morning of a woman in Mississippi who was pulled over by the state police and ordered to return home immediately. This is not shelter-in-place, this is incarceration-in-place.

Citizens are being urged to narc off neighbors who violate lockdown edicts, which sounds like the Stasi in East Germany, but does not sound remotely like the United States of America. Hardened criminals, including child rapists, are being released from prison to protect them from getting the virus in jail, apparently so we can stick law-abiding Americans in their vacant cells with a seeming indifference to whether or not they get sick and die in there.

Stores that sell guns have been forced to close while stores that sell pot and booze run wide open.

Here’s my suggestion to President Trump about how he can open America starting today.

First, let everyone who does not have coronavirus symptoms go back to work and school. There is no concrete, scientific evidence that asymptomatic people can infect others – all the “evidence” is circumstantial. Urge folks, of course, to be smart and sensible: wash their hands regularly and maintain social distancing if possible. (However, I do note that when the coronavirus task force gives briefings on the lethal dangers of the virus, they all cluster around whoever is at the microphone as if they’re afraid their faces won’t be on TV. Not much social distancing there.)

Second, urge people to self-quarantine the moment they begin to experience symptoms, by staying home from school and work. This is exactly the same advice we always give with regard to contagious diseases. Coronavirus carriers are the most contagious in the first five days.

Then let’s start symptomatics on a chloroquine regimen immediately. This is not an untested drug – many doctors have seen amazing results, even with very sick patients. There are multiple Americans who have publicly testified that they were at death’s door and were saved by chloroquine.

Chloroquine not only works as a cure but as a surrogate vaccine. Malarial countries have been using chloroquine since 1944, and these 40-50 countries show virtually no trace of the coronavirus. Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama-Huntsville was astonished to see the correlation when he plotted the outbreak in malarial countries versus non-malarial countries. He said he’d never seen anything so dramatic in his entire career.

Medical professionals like Dr. Fauci still continue to pooh-pooh chloroquine, which is astounding to me. The best explanation I can come up with is that chloroquine isn’t sexy, it’s old school, it’s only been protecting people since 1944, but what we want is something brand new that we developed (to be called “The Fauci Vaccine?”) so we can take credit for the brilliance that stopped this scourge. Alex, I’ll take any drug that works, for $1000, please.

Singapore, with a population of 5.6 million, has, as of this morning, a total of six deaths linked to coronavirus. Six. And Singapore is running pretty much wide-open. Schools, businesses, and restaurants are open. If Singapore can keep its country open, we can certainly reopen ours.

Third, if we are going to quarantine anybody, let’s only quarantine people over 70 with an underlying health condition like diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease, and the like. A striking 95% of the coronavirus deaths in Italy, for instance, have come among folks who are over 70 and have a pre-existing condition. The average age of death from the virus in Italy is 81. There is no need to shut down our entire country to protect this vulnerable segment of our population. We can and should focus on protecting them while letting America get back to work.

Economist Stephen Moore believes that if we don’t re-open by May 1, we will quickly find ourselves in another Great Depression (entirely self-inflicted, in my judgment) that will last for years. We will have destroyed the strongest and most powerful economy in world history by virtually shutting it down, when such a drastic over-reaction was simply not necessary.

So, in sum, we can reopen America by doing these simple things:

1. Send everybody who does not have symptoms back to work and school.
2. Urge people to stay home from school and work at the first sign of symptoms, and get them immediately on a regimen of chloroquine.
3. Quarantine everybody over the age of 70 with a pre-existing and complicating condition, like asthma or diabetes.

One of the largest problems we have is that too many people believe they should get to live in a hermetically sealed world in which they are shielded from anything bad. Such a world does not exist and will not exist until the Once and Coming King returns. Life itself is inherently risky, and we can’t insulate ourselves from all of its risks.

One of my mentors told me back in the day that signs should be put up at the border of the Golden State that read, “Leaving California. Resume normal behavior.” It’s long past time to do the same with coronavirus.