Free Republic

"Real Time" host Bill Maher on Friday night addressed the death of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran from California who was fatally shot inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Maher stressed that Babbitt "lost her life trying to prevent Biden from becoming president" -- despite the fact she was previously an Obama voter. He sympathized with Babbitt as a struggling business owner who was "pissed off at the greed and corruption," but insisted a second term for President Trump term would not have solved her problems since it was her home state of California that was "doing most of...

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds’s reluctance to embrace stringent coronavirus lockdown measures resulted in a case spike in November and guaranteed certain disaster over the holidays, according to an ominous story featured prominently on The Atlantic’s website in December. Titled “Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing,” the article, written by Iowa native Elaine Godfrey and published on December 3, attributed the brief statewide spike in cases and hospitalizations to Reynolds’s insistence on weighing economic factors when making decisions about COVID, and predicted that the state “can expect to see nothing less than a tsunami” over the upcoming holiday season.

Researchers in Ohio said Wednesday that they’ve discovered two new variants of the coronavirus that likely originated in the U.S. — one of which quickly became the dominant strain in Columbus, Ohio over a three-week period in late December and January. Like the strain first detected in the U.K., the U.S. mutations appear to make Covid-19 more contagious but do not seem like they will diminish the effectiveness of the vaccine, researchers said.

TWO cups of oolong tea a day can help you lose fat while you sleep, research suggests. Scientists found the tea boosts your metabolism while you kip — which keeps your body burning off calories. Like all tea, oolong contains caffeine which has been shown to boost fat breakdown by about 20 per cent. But experts discovered caffeine-only drinks stop working when you drift off — while the special tea continues to encourage your metabolism to keep going during sleep. Prof Tokuyama, of Tsukuba University, Japan, who did the study, said: “The stimulatory effects of oolong tea on fat breakdown...

Roughly one in every fifteen Americans have now tested positive for the novel coronavirus, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Over the past weekend, the United States surpassed twenty-two million cases and 370,000 related deaths—both figures by far the highest among all countries. Health officials, however, are anticipating even darker days ahead despite the surge in cases and fatalities in recent weeks.

The Trump administration recently finalized two rules meant to reduce Medicare drug prices -- while ignoring some serious unintended consequences. For seniors, the rules are a mixed bag. One will help patients save money at the pharmacy. But the other, the "most-favored-nation" rule, is likely to backfire, reducing access to treatments in the long run. The most-favored-nation rule prohibits Medicare from paying more for certain advanced medicines than the lowest price paid in other wealthy countries. It applies to physician-administered drugs, including treatments for osteoporosis, kidney disease and cancer. The list price of many of these drugs are deeply discounted...

MINNEAPOLIS—Overseeing sober living homes for newly recovering drug addicts is difficult in the best of times. But the endless shutdowns have created conditions that are challenging for healthy people, let alone those who are fresh out of rehab, vulnerable, and still reeling. Matt Royce, 35, oversees seven sober-living homes in Minneapolis. All of his houses, each holding between 9 and 13 people, have been “pretty full the whole time.” No overdose deaths had occurred in his homes in almost three years, but last summer he lost two people, while another three were revived from overdoses with opioid-blocker Narcan. Depression has...

Congressional leaders passed a new stimulus package meant to alleviate the financial pain of the coronavirus, but it won’t cure all that ails PennDOT’s pocketbook. PennDOT press secretary Alexis Campbell said Monday afternoon it wasn’t clear if the relief plan will cover the $600 million funding gap plaguing PennDOT. Early media reports indicate that $10 billion of financial relief could be distributed to the 50 states’ highway systems, though it’s unclear how much would come Pennsylvania’s way. State Sen. Pat Browne, a Lehigh County Republican and longtime chairperson of the Appropriations Committee, said Tuesday that transportation-specific wording included in the...

Distilleries just learned that to cap off a brutal year, the FDA is charging them a fee normally reserved for drug manufacturing facilities. For many American craft distillers, 2020 was already one of their worst years ever. The COVID-19-related closure of tasting rooms and cocktail bars, loss of tourism, and inability to offer in-store sampling slashed their sales revenue and cut them off from their customers. Then this week, just as it seemed they'd made it through the worst of a terrible year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had one more surprise in store: The agency delivered notice to...

A hospital employee in Wisconsin who "intentionally" ruined hundreds of doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine has been fired, Advocate Aurora Health said Wednesday. Earlier this week the medical center learned that 57 vials had been removed from a pharmacy refrigerator and left out overnight. Each vial contains 10 doses. “While some of the vaccine was administered to team members on Dec. 26 within the approved 12-hour post-refrigeration window, unfortunately most of it had to be discarded due to the temperature storage requirements,” Advocate Aurora Health said Monday. After an internal review, officials initially believed the cause was “inadvertent human...

A new polio outbreak in Sudan has been linked to the oral polio vaccine that uses a weakened form of the virus. ... WHO said two children in Sudan, one from South Darfur state and the other from Gadarif state, close to the border with Ethiopia and Eritrea, were paralysed in March and April. Both had been recently vaccinated against polio. The WHO said initial outbreak investigations showed the cases were linked to a continuing vaccine-derived outbreak in Chad that was first detected last year and is now spreading in Chad and Cameroon. While so-called vaccine-derived polio is a known...

“The Covid-19 Pandemic” ……. is it real? Some people stepped in to help right away! Let's think about it…..(well of course that would go against the MSM and the social media platforms like Face Book, Twitter, Google, YouTube, etc.) Miss-handlers or pushers of the fraud? Things went wrong and questions arose in the events in New York City early on. A tragedy was occurring with the need for hospital rooms and more nursing staff and equipment. President Trump responded with moving a Navy medical ship – The USS. Comfort with 1200 crew members up to Pier 90 in Manhattan, New...

Congressman-elect Luke Letlow (R-LA) has succumbed to COVID. He was 41 years old. He leaves behind his wife and two small children. He tested positive on December 18 but deteriorated rapidly. He passed away in the intensive care unit at Ochsner LSU Health in Shreveport. Letlow was chief of staff of outgoing Congressman Ralph Abraham (R-LA). He was set to take over his seat. It’s an absolute tragedy, but the ghouls are already out. This is social media in 2020. We shouldn’t be shocked by some of the reactions regarding the news of Rep-elect Letlow’s death. Julio will have more...

An Estimated 1.5 billion disposable face masks will end up in the oceans this year according to a Hong Kong-based conservation organization. OceansAsia based its estimate on 52 billion masks being manufactured in 2020 to meet the demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Their report also says that a “conservative” calculation means at least 3 percent of them will be washed out to sea. “Single-use face masks are made from a variety of meltblown plastics and are difficult to recycle due to both composition and risk of contamination and infection,” the report says.

Newly resurfaced footage of then-President George W. Bush urgently warning of the risks posed by pandemics in 2005 -- "If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare," Bush said at the National Institutes of Health -- has drawn belated praise from his detractors, and raised new questions as to the state of the federal government's disaster preparedness since his administration. In particular, a USA Today fact-check recently confirmed that the Obama administration had allowed the N95 mask stockpile to deplete following a series of crises, and apparently ignored calls for experts to renew...

In order for people to travel in 2021, they may eventually need a COVID vaccine passport. Several companies and technology groups have begun developing smartphone apps or systems for individuals to upload details of their COVID-19 tests and vaccinations, creating digital credentials that could be shown in order to enter concert venues, stadiums, movie theaters, offices, or even countries. The Common Trust Network, an initiative by Geneva-based nonprofit The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum, has partnered with several airlines including Cathay Pacific, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, as well as hundreds of health systems...

From Jan. 8, 2018 (Bandy's made a career of this) In a bid to have President Donald Trump removed from office, the left is pushing the “diagnosis” of a Yale psychiatrist who has ruled him “unfit” to be president. However, Dr. Bandy X Lee’s own dirty little secret has just been exposed — and it’s bad news for her career. Yale Psychiatrist who 'Diagnosed' Trump Unfit Has Dirty Secret That's Just Been Exposed After giving her professional psychiatric diagnosis of President Donald Trump, rendering him mentally unfit for office, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X Lee’s prestigious career is in hot...

The parent company of Lean Cuisine is recalling approximately 92,206 pounds of its baked chicken meal products that may be contaminated with extraneous materials, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced Saturday. Nestlé Prepared Foods, a Springville, Utah establishment, said the meals might be contaminated with pieces of white hard plastic. The meals — 8⅝-oz. (244g) carton trays of “Lean Cuisine Baked Chicken, white meat chicken with stuffing, red skin mashed potatoes and gravy” with a lot code of 0246595911 and “Best Before” date of October 2021 — were produced and packaged on Sept. 2. They...

Dr. Dean Winslow, infectious disease specialist at Stanford Health Care “The recently described SARS-CoV-2 variant has several substitutions both in the envelope spike protein and outside of that region that make this variant more transmissible between people. However, it does not appear to be more virulent or cause more severe disease. While it has not been specifically studied, these changes are not predicted to adversely affect the ability of the currently fielded vaccines to provide protection.”

The Allegheny County Health Department cited Al’s Cafe in Bethel Park and David’s Diner in Harmar late last week for serving meals indoors in defiance of the governor’s shut down order. The statewide restrictions, which expire Jan. 4, are aimed at stemming the current surge in COVID-19 cases. Inspectors visited both restaurants Thursday in response to complaints, according to the inspection reports. Both were ordered closed that day. Inspectors followed up Friday, when both restaurants were found operating and ordered closed again. Both also were cited for removing the county’s “closed” signs, inspection reports show. In addition, Al’s Cafe, on...