Free Republic

The CEO of Xenex Disinfection Services explained to Fox News on Wednesday how ultraviolet light can disinfect the coronavirus on masks in “about two minutes.” “Different germs are vulnerable to UV light at different wavelengths,” Morris Miller told “Fox & Friends First.” Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said Monday that a research team is in the "pre-clinical stages" of developing ways to harness UV light to treat viruses and bacteria, though such technology has not been tested on patients.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUpu46qHpgc&feature=emb_logo

“Two things,” said Hume. “First the collateral damage from it is extraordinary.” Hume explained that the initial reasons for the full lockdown was to “protect our medical system from being overwhelmed.” Except, he said, “hospitals are failing across the country.” “The damage to our medical, our health care system it seems to me is something we really have to take into account here,” said the Fox News correspondent. “It’s very serious.” Hume cited the “economic damage” and “budgetary harm” as other examples: “We are saddling our country and future generations with debt on a scale that was already high and...

The Chinese government should ban the sale of wild animals and refrain from using traditional Chinese medicine to advance Beijing’s political objectives. But that's not all wet markets are.> The news of Wuhan reopening its wet markets has caused angst and criticism around the world, because one of the wet markets in the city was identified as ground zero of the COVID-19 pandemic.Shutting down all wet markets in China is unrealistic. These markets are integral in Chinese people’s culture and way of life. More importantly, we shouldn’t confuse these wet markets with wildlife markets. The majority of wet markets do...

The Navy will conduct a wider investigation of circumstances surrounding the spread of the coronavirus aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, a move that effectively delays a decision on whether to reinstate the ship’s captain. The investigation was announced Wednesday by James E. McPherson, the acting Navy secretary, who said in a brief written statement that an initial inquiry was insufficient. “I have unanswered questions that the preliminary inquiry has identified and that can only be answered by a deeper review,” he said. ...“This investigation will build on the good work of the initial inquiry to provide a more...

I didn’t listen to any news yesterday, at least not on purpose. I was listening to our local NPR station around dinner time however. As I’ve explained before I listen because of the local host, an apolitical music impresario who plays a delightful mix of different genres. Take yesterday for example, he played a country tune by Shemekia Copeland (Johnny’s daughter), who normally sticks to wailing out a mean blues. The song was called “Out of Nashville” and contained some snappy lyrics: “I’m driving out of Nashville with a body in the trunk, Trying to figure out the depths to...

A Yahoo! reporter got his facts wrong during President Trump's briefing with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Tuesday. The reporter, Hunter Walker, asked Trump why South Korea was far outpacing the U.S. on testing per capita. A surprised President Trump shot back that Walker's numbers didn't sound quite right, and Dr. Deborah Birx confirmed his suspicions a few minutes later. Addressing Walker, Birx corrected him that while South Korea is at 11 tests per 100,000, the U.S. is at 17 per 100,000.  ICYMI: Mainstream media reporter tries to pick fight with President Trump and Dr. Birx, loses pic.twitter.com/zagZzPIPsK— Elizabeth...

Senator Tom Cotton was roundly ridiculed and branded a conspiracy theorist for saying that the Wuhan coronavirus may have come from a lab. There was an immediate false equivalence that he was accusing China of releasing an engineered bioweapon. That was never what he said, so we lived through weeks of China’s preferred “bat soup” story that insisted the virus came from a wet market. Then last week, something strange happened. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on China to outlaw wet markets to protect global health. These types of markets where wild animals are kept in close proximity to...

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is facing a growing sexual assault scandal, but Americans who only watch left-leaning TV networks may not have even heard about it. Biden’s former staffer Tara Reade went public with her claims on March 25, and since then new evidence has arisen, making her accusation far more credible than Christine Blasey Ford’s claims against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Yet left-leaning mainstream media outlets have nearly boycotted the story over the past month. The Media Research Center (MRC) analyzed the news coverage on ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and PBS between March 25 and April...

Democrat Kweisi Mfume won a special congressional election in Maryland on Tuesday and will replace the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) for the rest of his term in the state’s 7th district. Cummings, who chaired the House Oversight Committee, died at 68 in October 2019. His office told news outlets that he died due to “complications concerning longstanding health challenges.” Following Cummings’s death, over 30 people—including some two dozen Democrats—announced bids for the seat he had held since 1996. Mfume defeated Republican Kimberly Klacik to win the seat, with The Associated Press calling the race after 8 p.m. local time....

Turn out the lights, the election's over, and Trump has lost! So says Joe "Swami" Scarborough. On today's Morning Joe, Swami Scarborough repeatedly ripped as "idiots" Republicans who favor a faster re-opening of the country, and ultimately said: "These conserv -- not conservatives, they're idiots. These Trumpists who think that they're finding a way forward politically by attacking stay-at-home orders, they're the 10%, they're the 15%, they're in a minority. If they think this is how they're going to rebuild the future of the Republican party after Trump loses this fall, they are badly mistaken!" Get the rest of the...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is being accused of singling out his city’s Jewish community after a Brooklyn funeral was broken up by police for allegedly violating social distancing requirements being enforced during the coronavirus pandemic. The funeral of Rabbi Chaim Mertz in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn appeared to draw a massive crowd, as images of the scene appeared on social media. De Blasio even went to the site of the funeral with police before posting a tweet that touched off the backlash. “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the...

Remdesivir is widely considered to be a front-runner among the investigational therapies being tested as treatments for COVID-19 Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD) said that its experimental COVID-19 therapy remdesivir met the main goal in a government-funded clinical trial and that a shorter dosing regimen was as successful as a longer one in a separate study. The early findings set the stage for the closely watched drug to move toward a possible emergency use authorization or approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The drug is currently being used on an expanded use or compassionate use basis. Shares of Gilead...

Americans broadly support federal relief for businesses and workers, but they don’t want to bail out failed business models and corporate corruption. So how would they feel about bailing out the governance failures of America’s most corrupt state? Welcome to Illinois, America’s shrinking state, home to 1,000 public corruption convictions in the last 20 years. Our acquisitive state politicians want over $40 billion from other states in a brazen attempt to spread the Illinois model beyond our borders. My Democratic state Senate colleagues garnered national attention with a letter containing this audacious request. Gov. J.B. Pritzker has separately requested billions...

When Stanford University School of Medicine professor John Ioannidis warned on March 17 that the rush to implement sweeping coronavirus lockdowns could be “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco,” his was a lone voice amid the rising pandemic panic. Not any longer. As the statistical models on deaths are revised downward and the economic and social costs of the stay-at-home strategy grow more dire, contrarians are diving into the data and asking whether the lockdown pain was worth the gain — or whether the COVID-19 reaction was overblown. “It is now clear that the lockdowns were a major mistake everywhere except the...

The Biden campaign reportedly is relying on a New York Times report in talking points being circulated to combat the explosive sexual assault allegation made by the candidate's former Senate staffer, Tara Reade. BuzzFeed News reported on Tuesday that despite strong denials the campaign has issued to various media outlets, aides for former Vice President Joe Biden are taking Reade "seriously enough behind the scenes to coordinate messaging among other Democrats to try to cast the matter as one that’s been thoroughly vetted and determined to be unfounded." The "talking points" reportedly read, “Biden believes that all women have the...

Spitzer said the convicted men spent “just days” in jail instead of the six months required by law for those registered as sex offenders. The men apparently had also been charged with cutting off their GPS monitors or tampering with their tracking devices. They were released on April 7 as a result of rulings by appointed Court Commissioner Joseph Dane... “It is not the court’s responsibility to control the jail population by releasing these dangerous criminals back into our communities,” the DA said. “The residents of Orange County deserve to have the peace of mind that registered sex offenders are...

An I’m-so-cute-and-clever reporter recently asked the president if he deserved to be re-elected given the number of deaths from coronavirus, noting that the number is greater than American fatalities from the Vietnam war. People can always find something as a point of comparison as if that automatically adds weight to what they are implying. No doubt this reporter thought stats from the Vietnam war added gravitas to her query. In any case, her disrespectful and rude question didn’t deserve to be dignified with an answer. But Trump answered her anyway. Unfortunately, he didn’t use the opportunity to his advantage by...

...Recent reports, then, that excessive flab may be a leading indicator of susceptibility to the novel coronavirus are problematic indeed. Here are the specifics so far: as Melissa Healy reported in the Los Angeles Times last week, two new studies, both out of New York University, show that young and middle-aged COVID-19 sufferers with high body-mass indexes (BMIs) are “twice as likely as their non-obese peers to be admitted to the hospital for acute care instead of being sent home from the ER.” They’re also nearly twice as likely to end up in the ICU. (Among patients over 65, interestingly,...

China is badly bungling its diplomatic response to its responsibility for unleashing COVID 19 on the world, and the consequences for its ambition to become the world’s hegemon will be profound. As you may have seen, when Australia announced it would investigate the origins of the Coronavirus pandemic, China threatened a boycott. The leftist Guardian summarizes the contretemps:  Australia has been described as “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe,” by a Chinese state media editor as Beijing criticised calls for an inquiry into the coronavirus origin as “political manoeuvring,” further straining ties. Australia has emerged as one...