I don't care what the excuse is. People should be free to say what they think. Even if what they think goes against what the rest of society thinks.

Two judges in the 9th Circus have purported to suspend the 1st Amendment until there is a cure for the Kung Flu.

This doesn't actually surprise me much; there's historically a lot of latitude for this sort of thing during public emergencies. Courts will let the executive handle the emergency and focus on reviewing it all well after the fact.

The aspect this court is missing -- probably deliberately -- is whether there is actually an emergency that justifies that treatment. There's certainly a panic, but I'm not convinced the data shows an actual emergency. So can the government exaggerate an unusual, but not disastrous, new disease and get a pass from the bill of rights? I suspect not, but I doubt the courts will say so until more time makes the evidence very clear. Particularly courts with a liberal bias.

There's also the question of duration; temporary restrictions can pass muster where permanent ones would not. So, for how long are we supposed to hide from the Kung Flu? What happens if there is never a cure, never a vaccine, and (just like the normal flu or the common cold) we just have to learn to live with it? Does the bill of rights stay suspended then?

Fox News

There is increasing confidence that the COVID-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon but as part of China's attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China's government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News.

This may be the "costliest government cover-up of all time," one of the sources said.

The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus – a naturally occurring strain that was being studied there – was bat-to-human and that "patient zero" worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.

Just a few weeks ago, the idea that this originated in a Chinese lab was classed as a conspiracy theory. Now it's the known and accepted government theory.

In another few weeks, will the idea that the virus was deliberately modified in that lab become accepted as well? I expect it will, because I think that's exactly what happened.

And as for the bioweapon question, it's not just about whether and why the virus was developed. If China knew enough to close internal borders to Wuhan, but left Wuhan open to international travel, that's a damning measure of intent regardless of origin.

The death rate appears to be 0.26%, a little more than double that of the average flu (0.1%). Stanford researchers pegged that number over a month ago.

This was a political panic job designed to sabotage the economy. Not that the virus isn't real; that seems undeniable. Not that it wasn't manufactured in a lab -- case not proven yet, but it seems likely. But it certainly wasn't the deadly disease it was sold as when the CDC's Dr Fauci shut down the country.

Unanswered questions: So why did China shut down like they did? Maybe deliberately, because they hate Trump and were read in on the plot. Maybe they just panicked in the presence of an unknown disease. Maybe the disease really was as bad as advertised, but mutated to a less deadly strain. Maybe air pollution in China is bad enough to increase vulnerability. I don't know.

But I think the panic is over.

UPDATE: The panic is still over, but there is reason for skepticism about these numbers.

Australian researchers see evidence of human intervention.

It looks like the famous, or perhaps infamous, Dr Fauci is even more intimately involvewd in the Kung Fly debacle than he's admitting. Turns out that in his role at the Center for Disease Control, he funded the Chinese lab where the disease may have originated. Why? He was outsourcing viral gain-of-function research the US had banned after safety issues at CDC labs. What's gain of function research? Exactly what you might expect: adding new function to existing viruses. Like what happened to create the Kung Flu.

It's worth also pointing on when that funding happened. 2015, under Obama.

Jerusalem Post

"The best experts so far seem to think it was man-made. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point," Pompeo said. When the interviewer pointed out that was not the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies, Pompeo backtracked, saying, "I've seen what the intelligence community has said. I have no reason to believe that they've got it wrong."

I'll trust Pompeo's description of what the intel community's best experts think over what a random interviewer thinks they said, given that Pompeo's the one with the official clearances. I don't read Pompeo as backtracking at all.

We're a long ways from understanding everything going on behind the scenes with this virus. But Fauci appears to be central to it, and I don't think he's been asked the right questions yet.

In other somewhat unrelated news, Senator Burr is stepping down from the committee over an FBI investigation into insider stock trading around the Kung Flu.

I can't help but think this is merely convenient timing, and he's actually leaving for reasons related to SpyGate. Although the FBI investigation into his trading habits certainly justifies his removal by itself.

Washington Examiner

There is no actual shortage in livestock. (Remember, farmers are about to kill their produce needlessly.) Rather, the breakdown is coming on the plant side of the equation where cramped quarters are hazardous. Why can’t farmers sell directly to consumers and circumvent this problem? You guessed it — government regulations.

In 1967, the federal government blocked states from making their own decisions on how meat was processed and promptly handed the power to the Department of Agriculture, or USDA.

What followed was essentially a takeover of control of the industry. Farmers had to travel long distances and sell their livestock to a small number of USDA slaughterhouses instead of to local butchers, small processors, or directly to consumers. This relationship began to severely impact their profit margins as the government was able to force farmers to sell their product for pennies on the dollar. When you limit the number of places the producers can sell, you control the prices.

Wait, what? Why? Why was this done, why was it considered good policy? Even if you want the FDA to have regulatory control of food safety, why would you require in those regulations that food be processed in a large central facility instead of in a distributed (and thus resilient) system?

Let's let the free market and competition solve this problem.

The murder part is pretty solid. The suicide part is based on assuming a dead man they found was responsible for the murder. Who knows whether he was actually close to a breakthrough. But the whole situation is weird

Since Fauci funded the Chinese lab from which the virus escaped in order to evade a ban on gain-of-function research in the US, I'm not especially convinced by his insistence that the virus is natural. He's a snake and he's trying to hide his own culpability.

"Coronavirus party" claim retracted.

This virus certainly is revealing the totalitarian desires of the left.

Democrats are using this crisis to set up for political fraud in 2020.

... and as a bonus, they delayed real patients who were actually in line for testing.

This one seems to hit the right notes: early application and combination with azithromycin. It doesn't downplay the known risks of those drugs, and it attempts to control for other risk factors.

Most of the other studies on this topic have either not tried both of the drugs together or waited until patients were already hospitalized with a severe case.

More like this, please.

Quite a coincidence.

Actions have consequences. But the Democrats are still eager to release illegal aliens.

UPDATE: They let out Avenatti, another high-profile release. He's going to be spending his house arrest in Venice, apparently. We'll see if he is still there when he is supposed to come back. Weinstein was also released.

Fox News

The U.S. is conducting a full-scale investigation into whether the novel coronavirus, which went on to morph into a global pandemic that has brought the global economy to its knees, escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, Fox News has learned.

Intelligence operatives are said to be gathering information about the laboratory and the initial outbreak of the virus. Intelligence analysts are piecing together a timeline of what the government knew and “creating an accurate picture of what happened,” the sources said.

Once that investigation is complete -- something that is expected to happen in the near-term -- the findings will be presented to the Trump administration. At that point White House policymakers and President Trump will use the findings to determine how to hold the country accountable for the pandemic.

Holding China accountable is unlikely to be very successful. Yes, this situation will generate a lot of political support for policies to punish China. Which means what? Pulling our manufacturing out, applying more tariffs perhaps, things which we mostly wanted to do anyway (under Trump, at least). We're unlikely to get them to actually pay us trillions. They will ignore lawsuits or enforcement actions through international bodies. They already have enough intellectual property to be only mildly inconvenienced by losing access to more.

A military response is only really on the table if there is strong evidence they did this deliberately, and that's a hard case to make. (Accidentally, sure).

Our options for responding to this hostile act by China seem limited.

CIA issued a warning against hydroxychloroquine, saying it has potentially dangerous side effects, despite Trump talking up the drugs' usefulness against COVID-19. To be clear, they are both right: the drug is unproven but appears useful against COVID-19 but also has well-known risks and side effects that mean some people probably can't or shouldn't take it.

But the fact that someone at that agency was going out of their way to contradict the President is noteworthy.

Daily Mail

Senior Government sources say that while 'the balance of scientific advice' is still that the deadly virus was first transmitted to humans from a live animal market in Wuhan, a leak from a laboratory in the Chinese city is 'no longer being discounted'.

One member of Cobra, the emergency committee led by Boris Johnson, said last night that while the latest intelligence did not dispute the virus was 'zoonotic' – originating in animals – it did not rule out that the virus first spread to humans after leaking from a Wuhan laboratory.

The member of Cobra, which receives detailed classified briefings from the security services, said: 'There is a credible alternative view [to the zoonotic theory] based on the nature of the virus. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there is that laboratory in Wuhan. It is not discounted.'

I don't know where the virus originated, but there is quite a lot of credible evidence that it escaped from the virology lab in Wuhan. The lab was studying coronaviruses in bats, hiring people to study a new virus, and has had previously reported safety incidents related to their bats.