To the Editor:
“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” To our Founding Fathers, the idea of the “Pursuit of Happiness” encompassed what most of us today think of as basic civil liberties. No one would disagree that the right to free speech, the right to religion, and the right to peacefully assemble are just three examples essential to being American. They were so important to the Framers of the Constitution that it was the very first Amendment that began this great experiment we now call the United States of America.
The idea that America was formed by those who escaped tyranny, persecution, and totalitarian governments is a true testament to the land on a hill that many had only dreamed of before. Our nation has survived over 200 years of government under the Constitution, and with each challenge made to destroy it, America still holds strong as a world leader.
This is by no means a coincidence. Our constant need to pursue “Happiness” has led us to hold up our city upon a hill torch. We can credit our Constitution, in part, for that. However, we can never forget that it is the American people that makes all this possible. We need to protect our freedoms. That means teaching our children so they can teach their children and so on, the most important of protecting our freedoms. We must never allow “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” to be erased.
I thank The Epoch Times for your intelligent writing in reporting the truth and reminding us what our history has taught us. You bring a breath of fresh air to journalism and I am truly delighted to be part of your reading audience.
Cecilia Quinn, Esq.
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COVID-19
To the Editor:Thank you for your fine coverage of the Covid crisis and the attacks against human and political rights that it has engendered.
Here’s hoping that the medical establishment will start to weigh the economic and human costs of the consignment policy—how many lives are being destroyed, how many psyches being irreparably damaged (either directly through loneliness and related issues, or through despair resulting from being wiped out financially and economically)—against the putative benefits.
One of the sillier arguments I have seen in the media in the past day or two is the idea that there is a huge backlog of coronary and stroke issues building up that will strain the health care system after we pass the coronavirus crisis. Those who make this argument—which appears to be founded on nothing more than theorizing—would do well to examine the Covid hospitalization and death data to come up with a hard number as to how many of these so-called Covid hospitalizations are, in fact, coronary and stroke events where the Covid is nothing more than an extra factor in sick people’s situation. The Covid lobby, of course, strongly resists this more reality-based accounting because it would certainly show that the impact of the “crisis” has been immensely over-stated.
Yours truly,
Phillip Douglas
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What Do We Do Without a Vaccine?
To the Editor:The lack of a vaccine for SARS Cov-1 (2003) and MERS and Ebola illustrates the difficulties of developing safe and effective vaccines.
But we have other strategies to help us cope. We already have some medical therapies that are working. If we can treat the disease effectively, then the health care system won’t be overwhelmed and lives will be saved as the virus spreads inexorably in the vulnerable population.
We now know that silent spread is 50 to 85 times greater than symptomatic spread, at least in some communities. So even without a vaccine, silent immunity is growing at an extremely high rate.
We may be able to use what we do know about the virus to our advantage. In spite of our natural fear and instinct to protect our children, the reality is that COVID-19 doesn’t kill or severely harm children aged 1 to 19 y.o. In many countries most severely affected by this pandemic, the mortality rate in this population segment is zero. That is far less than the common flu.
Before we had a vaccine for chicken pox, a herpes virus, we would allow our children to get sick whether at school or at a neighbor’s house. We did not close down the schools. We knew that it was far better to get chicken pox as a kid rather than later as an adult. Once we know more about the immunity of COVID-19, whether children will develop long-lasting immunity, we may want to consider adopting the same practice again.
We also know that COVID-19 does its greatest damage to our elderly. People over the age of 80 have a very high rate of morbidity and mortality. We need to develop tailored strategies to protect and treat them. The elderly probably need to have an extended period of quarantine beyond the current lockdown, until we better understand the virus and have the ability to perform greater testing and effective contact tracing.
Sincerely,
Milton Chu, M.D.
