Gov. Sununu Draws Primary Challenge Over New Cases Lockdowns, Called "Drunk With Power"

munkle (47)in #karen • 4 years ago (edited)

Daughter of World War II Hero

With nearly three months gone by since the survival rate of the COVID-19 virus was revised by the CDC to about 99.8%, similar to flu which is 99.9%, Governor of New Hampshire Chris Sununu has drawn a primary challenge from the conservative wing of his party. Sununu, like other governors, has moved the COVID goalpost from the original slogan "flatten the curve" for 15 days, to hanging onto what the challenger says are unconstitutional powers based on mere "new cases" of the highly survivable virus. The challenger has charged Sununu with being "drunk with power."

Franklin City Councilor Karen Testerman

His challenger, Franklin City Councilor Karen Testerman, steps forward as US Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) dropped the bombshell last week, in a podcast interview, that he believes a government strategy is playing out to continue loosening and tightening lockdowns over new cases reports, in an endless tango, until a vaccine can be rolled out and made mandatory. The congressman said last week:

"they plan to keep us shut down until there is some kind of vaccine, and then whether it’s compulsory at the federal level, or the state level, or maybe they persuade your employers though another PPP program that you won’t qualify for unless you make your employees get the vaccine..."

Congressman Massie challenged his listeners:

"Somebody convince me that’s not their plan. Because there is no logical ending to this other than that.”

The actual COVID survival rate has turned out to be at least 20 times higher than early White House COVID briefings speculated, and is still trending upwards. The Imperial College scientist who predicted up to 2.2 million dead in the US without social distancing has been called one of the "most wrong" scientists in the world, since he began doing science, by other scientists.

Testerman, an Asian-American woman who is being compared to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem in her political views, said in a press release put out by one of her endorsing organizations, ReOpen NH:

“It’s time to stop the bullying. It’s time to confront the fear and let NH get back to school, get back to work, and get back to free and open recreation.”

Testerman holds a BS in Microbiology . Her father was a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated regiment in World War II. The battalion consisted solely of second generation Japanese-Americans, whose parents often were being held in the infamous US internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent. The battalion's awards include 21 Medals of Honor, some posthumous.

Testerman met her husband while working her way through college as a nurse's aide and he was in the Air Force. The Testermans' two sons are both veterans who have flown combat missions over Iraq and Kosovo, and their eldest daughter served in the US Coast Guard.

Testerman is a strong Second Amendment supporter, and has revealed she "packs."

Testerman questions the Constitutionality of RSA 4:45, the bill by which the New Hampshire Legislature gave the governor emergency powers after the announcement of the COVID crisis. She writes at her campaign website:

"We must not ever allow the Legislature to shirk its duty. The New Hampshire Constitution grants only to the General Court the power to make and suspend the laws, not a Governor who would be our master."

She says:

"NH must re-open for business without invasive emergency regulations unless the statutory regulatory process if followed. The governor shouldn’t be creating regulations to control every business and activity in the state....Public hearings must to be held to give ample opportunity for the public to comment."

Doctors and Scientists Say Constant Alarm on New Cases Not Helpful

Many doctors and scientists, such as Dr. David Katz of Yale say COVID response has been a misguided attempt to defy the normal course of low fatality rate disease. Compared to past viruses and pandemics, COVID-19 ranks very low in Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), which is the percentage of people who catch the virus who can statistically be expected to die.

Dr. John Ioannidis, C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, one of the most respected epidemiologists in the world, criticizes the constant media drumbeat over new cases as something that “doesn’t help.”

Dr. Ioannidis says:

“And how long a lockdown is enough? If we open now, will lockdown recur in autumn? Next year? Whenever authoritarianism so wishes? No dictatorship could imagine a better precedent for absolute control. Lockdowns were desperate, defendable choices when we knew little about covid-19. But, now that we know more, we should avoid exaggeration.”

Dr. John Ioannidis

Defiance Growing

Protests and acts of defiance have been growing. In California, a megachurch has fought and won a state supreme court challenge to its right to gather and worship, regardless of the virome, the viruses that inhabit an ecosystem.

In New Jersey, two gym owners who say the "14 days" are over have gathered a large following, and say they will go to jail rather than comply with Governor Tim Murphy's orders. The owners of Atilis Gym in Bellmyr have already been arrested once.

Across the country, a growing number of sheriffs and law enforcement officials have said they will not order their officers to enforce what they consider to be unconstitutional laws against mass gatherings, and will not send their officers into churches no matter what the government says.

And internationally, in Germany, officials are bracing for a two million person march which will follow up on a march which drew a massive 1.3 million person rally in Berlin on August 1st, in defiance of lockdowns, business closings, masks, and all other measures related to the government's COVID response which did not leave it to the individual and his or her personal doctor to decide how best to take care of his or her health.

Germany Anti-Lockdown Protest, August 1

During the US government response to the COVID-19 virus, true power has devolved to state governors, as state legislatures voted to cede binding authority to governors and executive orders. Testerman and others argue that state representatives, assemblymen, and state senators cannot vote away their Constitutional duty to stand before the voters as the sole makers of laws.

Last April Governor Chris Sununu, a member of the powerhouse NH political family which includes past Governor John Sununu, followed the lead of other governors by asking citizens to comply with a 15-day shut-down. The nation currently enters nearly 150 days of uncertainty and economic devastation, with unemployment rates not seen since the Great Depression, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses going back 70 or more years announcing that they are closing for good.

In late March and early April, following the recommendations of the CDC, state governments asked citizens across the country to help "flatten the curve" of pandemic which was striking primarily at the heart of New York City and the New York metropolitan area, where one-third of all COVID deaths have occurred. The fear was that, in contrast to past pandemics, the risk was real that hospitals would be stretched over capacity, in particular the availability of ventilators which might be needed for the most severely ill. The shortage of ventilators never came to pass, and the US is now a net exporter of ventilators.

Testerman's endorsers include two former members of the New Hampshire Legislature. She has taken to calling Gov. Chris Sununu "His Excellency King Sununu."

Vaccination Views

Despite the economic havoc wreaked by policies which government officials say are designed to curtail the disease, nearly 60% of Americans, according to recent polls, are wary of a vaccine for a coronavirus-type which has been developed at "warp speed," as the Trump administration has dubbed it.

Coronavirus-type vaccines, such as for SARS or MERS, have run into serious safety issues in the pastt, and had their animal trials aborted. Some of the safety issues were not apparent until seasons later, when wild, mutated viruses hit the animals, and triggered hyper-immune inflammatory responses which killed them.

Safe vaccination has become a growing issue in American politics thanks to the work of "pro-safe vaccination" activists such as Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center, and the nephew of the late president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr..

Testerman's stances suggest she would veto any attempt to make adult vaccines mandatory.

Although routinely misrepresented as being "anti" all vaccinations, these activists state repeatedly that they do not oppose vaccines, but are concerned about the growing number on the childhood schedule and emerging safety issues.

Testeman says at her website:

"Informed consent must be respected. Patients should be informed of all ingredients in their treatment, whether it is a medication or a vaccination. Individual decisions should be respected."

Even with vaccines which are widely respected as necessary for serious diseases such as polio, things have gone wrong. One of the best known was in the development of a polio vaccine, during which in the late 1950s and early 60s, hundred of thousands of children were administered polio vaccines which then caused over 40,000 cases of polio, leaving hundreds paralyzed and some dead.

Pro-safe vaccine activists roundly condemn the role of the profit motive inside the "big pharma" industry in motivating the proliferation of possibly unnecessary vaccines, and the common overlap between profit-motivated industry executives and government health policy-making officials.

"Safe vax" activists believe tinkering with anything as complex and still not fully understood as the human immune system should be a last resort, with treatments taking priority for development.

Challenging the Media Narratives

Testerman's challenge to Sununu comes amid a climate of contradictory information and media messaging which requires the utmost diligence to penetrate and discern what is true. The case of Sweden is a case in point. Many articles from primarily mainstream sources portrayed the Swedish decision to not "lock down" as a "failure," inevitably comparing Swedish deaths per capita to the rates of neighboring countries Denmark, Norway and Finland, which did "lock down" and have lower death rates.

But the same articles never explained why Norway and Finland are cherry-picked for comparison, but not Belgium, Italy, Spain, or even the USA, which has less than a 10% difference in death rate despite the economic and social devastation in these countries resulting from lockdowns, which Sweden avoided. Swedish restaurants, clubs, and stores did not go under by the hundreds of thousands, since businesses stayed open.

Both deaths and new cases in Sweden have plunged now, with no "second wave" anticipated due to widespread herd immunity.

In the US, the press has yet to touch upon the case of Wisconsin, where the state's highest court struck down the governor's lockdown edicts, and thus never locked down, but where nevertheless the death rate is one of the lower ones in the country.

Regarding the virus's effect on children, although they are not "immune" as President Trump recently was lambasted for saying, according to a Bloomberg News report children are more likely to die of flu if they catch it.

Source: Bloomberg

In all the constant media barrage over COVID, the tone is undoubtedly alarmist, even though there is ample reason to doubt that the numbers being reported are accurate. Many doctors and medical staff have stepped forward over the months, such as Dr. Scott Jensen, to suggest that COVID deaths are being inflated.

In New York, a scandal is building after Gov. Andrew Cuomo was accused by nursing home executives of placing COVID patients in within the most vulnerable populations, nursing homes, where the some of the highest death rates in the world have been recorded.

On March 25, Bloomberg reported that New York City had bought 45 refrigerated morgue trucks in anticipation of a surge of deaths. On the same day, according to US New and World Report, Cuomo issued an order to house COVID patients in New York nursing homes, and “ushered more than 6,300 recovering virus patients into nursing homes at the height of the pandemic.”

Two weeks later, the first sensational reports hit the media of COVID deaths in NY being so high that the city was forced to use refrigerator trucks to manage the overflow of bodies.

Deaths reported as COVID are up to 160,000. There is an ongoing controversy as many doctors claim that many or most of these lives might have been saved had the debate over protocols using the common malaria drug hydroxychloroquine not been politicized.

About 8,000 people die in the US every day, close to 3 million per year.

New York and Cuomo are not the only states accused of “seeding” vulnerable populations.

One Twitter "influencer," an independent journalist and statistical analyst, questions how the main causes of death in America, heart disease and cancer, went down so sharply in New York State after COVID showed up (below.)

Chart: Can we believe COVID numbers?

Source: https://twitter.com/WriterRomana/status/1250533759637651457/photo/1/

Testerman: Everyone in New Hampshire is "Essential"

Testerman has four children and twelve grandchildren.

On masks Testerman says:

"it is a health issue with an individual...I'm very concerned about the fact that they think they can control the people by saying that they have to wear masks..."

In an interview with a Facebook NH elections 2020 livestream Testerman said:

"everyone in the state of NH is essential...we need to address where the largest number of cases are being impacted and that is in our long-term care facilities. I question why we have not stopped closing everything...and not started concentrating on our seniors, because that is where 80% of our deaths are occurring."

The story of Testerman's father's regiment in World War II is a little-known and fascinating piece of American history.. After Pearl Harbor, as law-abiding American citizens of Japanese descent were shamefully rounded up and sent to internment camps in California, Washington, and Oregon, thousands of the men offered to fight rather than sit out the war in a camp.

So was formed the US Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was stationed in Europe. In one of its most famous engagements, the 442nd saved a regiment from Texas which was pinned down on a hilltop in France by German forces. Two American infantry battalions had already failed to rescue the trapped regiment.

According to historians, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team fought for five days in a bitter slog in mud and cold weather, "tree to tree," before finally rescuing the trapped regiment. Out of 3,000 men the 442nd sustained 800 casualties. In 1962 Texas Governor John Connelly declared all members of the 442 "Honorary Texans."

The New Hampshire Republican primary is on September 8th. City Councilwoman Karen Testerman's Twitter feed is @KarenTesterman Her website is KarenTesterman.com

Testerman Recent Interviews

442nd Regimental Combat Team