☕️ IMMUNITY ☙ Monday, February 19, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The baffling and mysterious epidemic of sepsis, explained; and — finally! — my thoughts about Judge Engoran’s whopping $354 million dollar fine against President Trump.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Welcome to a brand-new week. I am time restricted this morning, as I am attending a special announcement ceremony in nearby Newberry. It’s still a secret and it’s going to blow the blue County’s socks off. Local, local, local!

But you still get a great roundup: The baffling and mysterious epidemic of sepsis, explained; and — finally! — my thoughts about Judge Engoran’s whopping $354 million dollar fine against President Trump.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Behold this Cassandric headline from yesterday’s Daily Mail UK, which unintentionally revealed the scale of a tidal wave of novel jab injuries in a whole new category. This story connects some dots that will blow your mind.

We begin with Gina’s SADS story. Pay special attention to the highlighted phrase:

Gina’s tragic bad luck isn’t our point, but let’s still pause to pay our respects. Her story sounds all too maddeningly familiar: Gina had some difficult flu symptoms, drove to the ER, doctors said it was just a virus, go home and sleep it off, she went home and climbed into bed, went septic while sleeping, this time ambulanced back to the ER, where she had an ultra-rare complication, stroked out and died, that fast, less than a day, the end.

Gina’s twin-like sister Maria described Gina as “young, fit, and healthy.” We don’t know Gina’s jab status for sure, but in March 2022, the BBC reported that a whopping 92% of British adults had scored at least one jab, with 85% more having already passed second jab going around 85mph and rapidly homing in on third. Given those odds, plus her atypical, young, sudden adult death that a few short years ago would have triggered a major inquest, I will presume Gina was jabbed until offered credible proof she wasn’t.

Gina’s was an awful story, and our hearts break for Maria and for Gina’s other loved ones. But please. What was the reporter doing? Burying the lede.

Let me ask you a hypothetical question. Pretend I am a journalism professor and you are a budding young wannabe reporter, having just submitted Gina’s story as an assignment. I skim it. “It’s a nice start,” I begin encouragingly, “but let me ask you something. Do you think your readers — the general public — will be more interested in Gina’s untimely death or in the worrying rise in sepsis cases?”

Then you answer, “well, Gina’s attractive and relatable and I have this great picture of her…” And I say, “Come on. People should be worried whether it’s going to happen to them. Go rewrite this, make the sepsis outbreak the lede, and use Gina as a two-paragraph human interest hook.”

These student writers!

The bigger story is in there. The Mail did report the sepsis outbreak, but just buried it, a mere side-issue, under a lot of distracting mental junk food. If the sepsis outbreak was the fries, Gina’s story loaded on the cheese sauce, bacon bits, onion straws, shredded lettuce, and ranch dressing. You can’t even see those fries.

Here are the relevant sentences, the facts the Mail actually reported (when you unload Gina’s tragic story):

Sepsis now causes more deaths than breast, prostate and bowel cancer combined. (While sepsis) is most common in the elderly … studies suggest that just under half of all sepsis cases occur in working-age adults.

Sepsis should not be happening in working-age adults in any large numbers.

Sepsis is a sudden bacterial infection that can kill someone in hours. It normally strikes immune compromised people, like the elderly, very young, the chronically-ill, and unfortunate folks hooked up to invasive medical devices for long periods of time. It should not surprise you that sepsis is sort of baffling and mysterious and poorly-understood. It’s not even really a specific disease or condition. It’s a syndrome or process, the body’s overreaction to any type infection — viral, bacterial, or even fungal. It’s a catastrophic failure of the immune system.

Try to follow me here.

Sepsis, as a diagnosis, has several strongly suggestive qualities in light of the recent jabby unpleasantness. First, there’s no test for it, so doctors can diagnose it based on their subjective analysis of symptoms, which could be useful if you wanted to conceal certain death statistics. Second, the most common mechanism of ultimate septic death is blood clots and leaky blood vessels. So. Third, historically speaking, the most rapidly-progressing cases are always seen in the most immunocompromised patients, like elderly folks already in the hospital for some other condition.

Rapid sepsis isn’t normal in young, healthy, 30-year old women like Gina. In fact, it’s super, super rare. Young people need to have really, really bad luck to encounter the disastrous syndrome.

So … what do they say could be causing this sudden outbreak of sepsis in the community, especially among healthy people? You’ll never guess. They’re blaming the doctors. Hey Doctors! You knew it was inevitable you’d be thrown under the bus, right?:

Britain's worrying rise in deaths from sepsis may be due to some doctors not taking the condition seriously, according to the UK's top sepsis expert (who said) the blame can also fall on a significant number of sceptical clinicians who believe the crisis is 'all hype and hysteria'.

See? It’s not the rising cases, it’s doctors failure to respond properly to the rising cases. Brilliant.

They’re arguing that healthy young people like Gina who come in with flu symptoms should also be screened for sepsis — which has no test, mind you — and be immediately started on a massive course of antibiotics if there’s any chance sepsis could be somewhere on the diagnostic radar. It’s utter nonsense. If sepsis is ultra-rare in healthy young people, why should busy ER doctors waste time screening every patient with a sniffle for sepsis, especially considering there’s no test for it? And, if young people normally have less severe cases even when they do get septic, what’s the urgency?

Well, you know the answer. It’s the thing they don’t want to say.

There does seem to be some kind of new epidemic. Just one day before, the Daily Mail ran another sepsis death story, oddly also involving another young woman, aged 29, and also a sister:

The story explained that the young lady died about two weeks ago from “sepsis caused by a rare cancer.” So. A jabby two-fer.

Another story from Sky News on January 20 was headlined “Emily In Paris actor Ashley Park reveals sepsis battle and thanks co-star boyfriend Paul Forman for being at her bedside.” Ashley, 32, got tonsilitis and wound up in the hospital with “several of my organs affected,” and spent “a week in the ICU.”  And let’s not forget bizarre pop superstar Madonna, who was hospitalized with sepsis-like symptoms last summer.

I’m going to suggest that it’s not an epidemic of sepsis. Anyway, sepsis is a syndrome and not a condition. But I’ll tell you what corporate media is afraid to tell us. They are afraid to remind us that, back in the 1980’s, people were dying from AIDS, except they weren’t dying from AIDS, so much. AIDS patients were dying in septic shock after otherwise mild infections like flu and tonsillitis and stuff.

The worrying rise in sepsis deaths was just what doctors saw in the 1980’s as the AIDS epidemic took off. That’s what they don’t want to say.

So whenever you read a sepsis headline, especially in a working-age person, think AIDS. Or … VAIDS.

🔥 Thank you for your patience on getting to the Trump fine. On Friday, NBC ran an eye-popping story headlined, “Judge fines Donald Trump more than $350 million, bars him from running businesses in N.Y. for three years.”

I realize it’s difficult to keep up with the rogue’s gallery of politically-partisan judges and prosecutors pursuing President Trump, but by now you’ve probably heard plenty about the historic $354 million-dollar criminal penalty pinned on President Trump and his New York companies on Friday. The case started last year with an equally historic premise, using a statute that had never been used this way before against anyone, never mind against a President, and relying on a logic-defying factual allegation of financial fraud even though the banks that got Trump’s allegedly fraudulent financial statements said everything looked fine to them.

There are two major prongs in civil cases: liability and damages. You need to prove both to win a civil case. It is not quite the same way in criminal cases but it’s comparable, especially where, as here, the alleged crime (fraud) has a civil analogue. Proving criminal fraud everywhere but in New York requires proof of three things: an intent to deceive, a victim’s reliance on a deliberately-false representation, and an actual injury caused by the victim’s reliance on the deceptive representation.

New York’s novel criminal statute (never used this way before) strips two of the three elements, dehydrating the age-old ‘crime’ down to a new-age essence: the mere intent to deceive. Judge Engoran — a partisan democrat from way back — had no trouble finding that Trump intended to deceive the banks. It doesn’t matter whether the bankers said they were deceived or not, that’s reliance, an antique element jettisoned from New York law after State Attorney Letitia James woke up one morning with her brain hurting on the left side.

In other words, they’ve reduced the crime to the democrats’ absolute favorite: a thought crime. The only wrinkle under the statute is that the intent to deceive must be financially-related and written down. The fact the crime is only based on Trump’s intent is democrat partisans are proud of. For example:

Next up is the damages, or the lack thereof. Under our Constitutional system of criminal justice, punishments must be proportional. That’s basic Eighth Amendment law going back to the very beginning. There can be no cruel or unusual punishment. Which includes excessive fines. That is undisputed.

Here’s what the New York Times reported about the damages back in November:

So how did Judge Engoran calculate that his $354 million fine was proportional? Proportional to what?

The judge buried that calculation in a mind-numbing array of complicated hypotheticals, such as imagining that — despite what the bankers said — Trump might have paid a higher interest rate on the loans if his financials had looked different. That got the judge part of the way, and then he imposed a massive $250-million clawback of what he decided were “unjust profits.”

All the judge’s complicated calculations elided the requirement of proportionality to the damage actually caused.

So what comes next? An appeal. Unlike the $83 million civil verdict against President Trump in the bizarre sex assault case, there is no remittitur available for a criminal fine. So Trump will proceed directly to appeal — an appeal demonically calibrated to inflict the most possible pain, since under New York law, in order to appeal Trump must first post a bond in the full amount of the fine plus interest — over $450 million dollars.

President Trump can either put up the cash or buy a bond. Appeal bond fees cost around ten percent of the total, or $45 million dollars, which Trump would never get back. If he ultimately loses, the bonder would pay the fine but keep $450 million in Trump’s collateral, which the President was required to pledge to secure the bond. If Trump wins, he pays nothing further, but the bonder still keeps the bond fee.

Trump’s appeal now must work its way through New York’s liberal court system. Ironically, the state names its courts backwards — the trial court is called the “supreme court” — but the basic idea is the same as everywhere else. Trump must appeal first to the appellate division, and from there to New York’s supreme court, and from there to the U.S. Supreme Court — but he can only appeal to the USSC on Constitutional issues, of which there are several.

Everyone wants a prediction, but the case is a unicorn, which makes it utterly unpredictable. The one predictable part has already occurred, which is that the hyper-partisan judge and prosecutor reached this result. It was inevitable, everyone knew it, the threat of this judgment was meant to dissuade Trump from running for President. Now the unpredictable appellate part begins.

It is literally unthinkable that any court of appeals would uphold this decision. The criminal statute that the judgment was based on is Constitutionally infirm because it is vague; businesspeople in New York can’t accurately predict what conduct is prohibited. The judgment itself is Constitutionally infirm because it is wildly disproportionate to any legitimate harm caused to victims, despite Judge Engoran’s best efforts to find the victims’ testimony not credible and to calculate injuries they denied having.

Trump has excellent arguments for each of the legal aspects of the case. It’s almost an understatement to say the facts favor Trump, not least that the banks testified they weren’t harmed. The case itself was always tailor-made for an appellate court, with its high profile nature, political implications, celebrity defendant, and media interest.

As a lawyer advising clients, my rule of thumb in normal cases only handicaps using three percentiles: 25%, 50%-50%, and 75%. So I might say this case is a dog, you’ve got a 25% chance to win. Or, this is a great case, we’re looking at a 75% probability of winning. Seventy-five percent is as high as I go in a normal case, because even good judges and juries make mistakes, never mind bad ones.

Celebrity cases like this one break the rules. There’s nothing to compare them to. But the good news is that Trump’s lawyers have everything they need to win. It might’ve been the other way, with Trump facing difficult law and hard facts. But he’s in the best possible position to win, which should be encouraging.

Lately I often hear people complain about the use of donor money to pay Trump’s litigation expenses. That seems wrong-headed to me. Trump is only facing the litigation because he’s running for President. Donald J. Trump is the one taking all the risk — risk of bankruptcy and prison. If people don’t donate, he’s a dead Donald. So his litigation costs are campaign expenses. It’s that simple.

It might be time for a Trump multiplier. What do you think?

Okay, I have to run. Have a magnificent Monday! And come on back here tomorrow morning for lots more Coffee & Covid.

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