Dr. Robert A. Petzel, Under Secretary for Health, talks with Senator Bernard Sanders (I-Vermont), Chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, about VA’s store and forward teleretinal imaging. Teleretinal imaging collects data and images from a Veteran patient and then forwards it to a specialist at another site, where it is retrieved and evaluated.
Pat Buchanan writes on his blog (abridged):
The death toll as of Thursday was 2,800, out of 82,000 cases of coronavirus worldwide.
Already, Democrats are piling on Trump for cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and failing to reflect the seriousness of the threat.
The issue does present a challenge to Trump’s presidency. His handling of it may determine his stature as chief executive.
The issue is also tailor-made for Trump.
If Trump acts as a leader, urging unity in the struggle to contain the virus and discover a vaccine, the hectoring from the Democratic left, already begun, can come to be seen as unpatriotic.
Also, Trump’s probable opponent this fall, who would be in charge of preventing the coronavirus from spreading like the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, is Bernie Sanders. And what are Sanders’ credentials and plans?
Under “Medicare for All,” Sanders intends to nationalize the entire U.S. heath care system and abolish the private health insurance plans of 140 million Americans who now depend on them.
As for the pharmaceutical industry, uniquely situated to assist in the crash effort to find a cure for the coronavirus, Sanders will confiscate its profits and put those profiteers out of business.
The chickens of globalization are coming home to roost.
In recent decades, America’s economic and political elites of both parties surrendered America’s economic independence for globalism, a new interdependence of nations, where we Americans no longer rely on ourselves alone for the vital necessities of our national life.
That decision is now being exposed as the folly against which Hamilton and economic nationalists always warned.
According to The Washington Post, critical ingredients of medicines and drugs, upon which many American lives depend, are made in Chinese factories now in danger of being shut down.
Pat Buchanan. February 28,2020
