Today's News: October 08, 2020

World News

UK govt ‘hasn’t yet seen’ desirable impact from local lockdowns, but is considering new curbs in northern England

RT – The UK government wants to be “more consistent” on localized restrictions amid the rise in coronavirus cases in the north of England, admitting that the current measures so far have not been sufficiently effective.
With 14,162 people across the UK diagnosed with Covid-19 on Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to order new coronavirus curbs within days on pubs in northern England. The measures could include closing them altogether in Liverpool, Manchester, and Newcastle, after a surge in cases.
Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick says the government is considering different options because the virus is rising, “in terms of the number of cases, quite significantly” in the north west, the north east and in a number of other cities such as Nottingham.
Local lockdowns would have “flattened the curve” of infection rates in certain areas, the minister told Sky News. However, the measures have yet to bring about a desirable effect.
“We haven’t yet seen the impact that we would like to have seen, and we understand that’s extremely frustrating to local people in those areas,” Jenrick said. But he added that if the government hadn’t imposed local lockdowns, then the rate of infection “would almost certainly be even higher.”

Former ministers to hold ‘rapid’ inquiry into government’s Covid-19 response

Guardian – A pair of Conservative former ministers have announced they are to lead a rapid, cross-party investigation into the UK’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, amid worries a government inquiry will take too long for lessons to be learned in time.
In a rare set of joint hearings, the Commons health committee, led by ex-health secretary Jeremy Hunt, and the science committee, chaired by Greg Clark, who was business secretary, are to hear from witnesses in the hope of producing a report by the spring.
Announcing the plan, Hunt and Clark said the inquiry would aim to produce interim recommendations along the way. It will hold weekly joint sessions, with early witnesses set to include Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, and Patrick Vallance, the government’s top scientific adviser.

World’s Top Epidemiologists Oppose Madman Fauci and Call for End to Lockdowns

Health Impact News – Three of the world’s top epidemiologists are going public to contradict Dr. Fauci and other doctor politicians who are calling for renewed lock-downs over the Coronavirus.
They are:
Dr. Martin Kulldorff – Harvard Medical School Professor
Dr. Sunetra Gupta – Oxford University Epidemiology Professor
Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya – Stanford Epidemiology Professor
They were interviewed Monday night by Laura Ingraham on Fox News. They claim that the consensus in the scientific community is NOT in favor of locking down entire populations, but only those at most risk, and they are calling for the end of lock-downs for the vast majority of the population who are not at risk for COVID.
And they are not alone. They published the “Great Barrington” declaration this week which has already been signed by over 1000 medical and public health scientists within the first few hours of being published.

U.S. News, Politics & Government

Pence, Harris spar over Supreme Court, COVID, economy in closely fought debate

Fox – Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence did not waste time trading fire over President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the idea of packing the Supreme Court, and taxes as they faced off Wednesday night in their first and only debate before the Nov. 3 election.
The two nominees were significantly more cordial to one another in Utah than Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden were in their first presidential debate last week in Cleveland, though they clashed several times throughout the night when Pence spoke over Harris.

Trump says US troops in Afghanistan should be ‘home by Christmas’

Al Jazeera – All US troops in Afghanistan should be “home by Christmas”, President Donald Trump said, just hours after his national security adviser said Washington would reduce its forces in Afghanistan to 2,500 by early next year.
A landmark deal between the United States and the Taliban in February said foreign forces would leave Afghanistan by May 2021 in exchange for security guarantees by the Afghan armed group.

Donald Trump refuses to participate in virtual debate

Al Jazeera – US President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would not participate in a debate with Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden under a new format announced Thursday by the debates commission in which each candidate would appear at remote locations.
In an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump said the new virtual format announced by the Commission on Presidential Debates was not acceptable to him.
“I’m not going to do a virtual debate,” he said soon after the rule changes were announced.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager said in a statement that “President Trump won the first debate despite a terrible and biased moderator in Chris Wallace, and everybody knows it.
“For the swamp creatures at the Presidential Debate Commission to now rush to Joe Biden’s defense by unilaterally canceling an in-person debate is pathetic. That’s not what debates are about or how they’re done,” Stepien, who also tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this week, said.
The commission said the debate, scheduled for October 15, would see the audience – who typically ask the candidates questions in a town-hall meeting format – and moderator Steve Scully gathering in one location in Florida, Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow it to halt census count

The Hill – The Trump administration on Wednesday filed an emergency request to the Supreme Court seeking to halt the 2020 census count.
The filing comes hours after a California-based U.S. appeals court denied a similar request from the administration to reverse a lower court’s order requiring the count to continue through October, rather than reinstate the administration’s since-passed Oct. 5 deadline.
The administration told the justices that the shorter window is necessary to allow the Commerce Department to wrap up operations in time to meet its end of year deadline to report the results to the White House.

Facebook Says Users Can Wish For Trump’s Death By COVID So Long As They Don’t Tag Him

National File – Facebook’s notoriously strict and convoluted hate speech and Community Standards policies will allow users to post hopes, dreams, and wishes that President Donald Trump dies from COVID-19, as long as they don’t make the effort to deliberately search for his Facebook page and manually tag his account.
Section 9 of Facebook’s Community Standards states, “We distinguish between public figures and private individuals because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news or who have a large public audience. For public figures, we remove attacks that are severe as well as certain attacks where the public figure is directly tagged in the post or comment.”
Facebook’s restrictions on “Calls for death, serious disease, epidemic disease, or disability” only apply to private individuals or public figures who are of minor age, meaning wishing death, serious disease and the other referenced attacks on adult public figures is not considered actionable by Facebook so long as the public figure’s account is not manually tagged in the post or comment.

TWITTER Ordered to Unmask User Who Spawned Seth Rich Conspiracy.

A federal judge in California has ordered that Twitter reveal the identity of an anonymous user who allegedly fabricated an FBI document to spread a conspiracy theory about the killing of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who died in 2016.
The ruling could lead to the identification of the person behind the Twitter name @whyspertech. Through that account, the user allegedly provided forged FBI materials to Fox News. The documents falsely linked Rich’s killing to the WikiLeaks hack of Democratic Party emails in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

Top House Republicans light into DC elections board for ‘failure to take responsibility’ for voter rolls

Fox – Top House Republicans on Thursday are sending a letter to the Washington, D.C., Board of Elections (DCBOE) expressing concern over reports that many ballots are being sent to people who have moved or died and lighting into the board for “its failure to take responsibility” for its voter rolls.
The letter comes after D.C. began mailing ballots to residents late last month in an effort to allow people to avoid polling places on Election Day and prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. But soon after there were widespread complaints from voters that they were getting ballots that were addressed to people who had in some cases not lived at a particular residence for years. Some voters reported that they still were sent ballots for voters who no longer lived in their residence even after they had returned DCBOE postcards confirming that certain voters no longer lived at their address.
“Notwithstanding its failure to take responsibility for creating this avoidable situation, the Board places a large onus squarely on individual citizens to clean up a mess solely of the Board’s making,” said the Republicans, led by Oversight Committee Ranking Member James Comer of Kentucky. “This appears to be the only ‘safeguard’ in place, with no other procedures to avoid, detect, and/or divert misaddressed ballots.”

Looting Begins as Violent Protest Continues in Wisconsin

Breitbart – The march from Milwaukee to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, descended from peaceful protest to vandalism to looting on Wednesday night. Under the cover of darkness, dozens of protesters began smashing windows of homes and businesses and moved on to loot a convenience store.
Independent journalist Brendan Gutenschwager captured video of multiple looting a gas station convenience store in Milwaukee Wednesday night.

Energy & Environment

Busy 2020 hurricane season has Louisiana bracing a 6th time!

AP – Louisiana residents still recovering from the devastation of a powerful hurricane less than two months ago braced for another hit as Hurricane Delta steamed north through the Gulf on Thursday after swiping Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
Forecasters warned that the storm could blow ashore Friday with winds of up to 100 mph (160 kph) and a storm surge of up to 11 feet (3.4 meters). They placed most of Louisiana within Delta’s path, including the southwest area of the state around Lake Charles, where Category 4 Hurricane Laura ripped houses from their foundations, peeled off roofs and tore trailers in half on Aug. 27.

A Half-Million Sharks To Be Killed for COVID-19 Vaccine

Mercola – According to conservationists and wildlife experts, the plan to vaccinate the global population against COVID-19 will have a devastating environmental impact, as one of the vaccine ingredients, squalene, is made from shark liver oil.
To satisfy a global supply of squalene-containing vaccines, an estimated half-million sharks would have to be slaughtered. At present, five COVID-19 vaccine candidates are using squalene as an adjuvant to boost the immune response to the vaccine and elicit higher antibody titers.1,2,3
Added to the more than 3 million sharks already killed for their livers each year, the added demand could push certain shark species, such as gulper and basking sharks that are particularly rich in squalene, to the brink of extinction.4 According to the New Zealand Herald:5

Health

Experts Weigh in on Vitamin D for COVID-19

Mercola – Aside from insulin resistance, discussed in “The Real Pandemic Is Insulin Resistance,” mounting research reveals vitamin D deficiency is one of the primary risk factors for severe COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, complications and death.
Vitamin D can strengthen your immune system in a matter of a few weeks, and according to recent research, correcting vitamin D deficiency could save thousands of lives in Great Britain alone. As reported by conservative member of the British Parliament David Davis and writer Matt Ridley in a September 26, 2020, article in The Telegraph:1
“As we face six tough months of curfews, isolation and economic misery, with vaccines a distant hope, testing struggling to control the virus, and the hospitalization rate once again rising, it’s surely time to try anything reasonable to slow the pandemic down.
There is one chemical that is known to be safe, known to be needed by many people anyway, known to have a clinically proven track record of helping people fight off respiratory diseases, and is so cheap no big firm is pushing it: vitamin D. It is not a silver bullet, but growing evidence suggests that it might help prevent COVID turning serious in some people.”
Randomized Control Trial Confirms Vitamin D Cuts ICU Rates
As reported by The Telegraph, while initial support for vitamin D relied on data showing correlations between vitamin D levels and infection rates and COVID-19 outcomes, we now have a randomized, controlled trial backing it up.
The study,2,3,4,5 published online August 29, 2020, found hospitalized COVID-19 patients who received supplemental calcifediol (a vitamin D3 analog also known as 25-hydroxycholecalciferol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D) in addition to standard of care — which included the use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin — had significantly lower intensive care unit admissions. It also eliminated deaths.
Patients in the vitamin D arm (50 out of 76 enrolled patients) received 532 micrograms of calcifediol on the day of admission (equivalent to 106,400 IUs of vitamin D6) followed by 266 mcg on Days 3 and 7 (equivalent to 53,200 IUs7). After that, they received 266 mcg once a week until discharge, ICU admission or death.
Of those receiving calcifediol, only 2% required ICU admission, compared to 50% of those who did not get calcifediol. In other words, the addition of vitamin D reduced a patient’s risk of needing intensive care 25-fold.8
What’s more, none of those in the vitamin D arm died, compared to 7.6% in the standard care group. The graph below, created by GrassrootsHealth,9 illustrates the difference in ICU admissions and deaths between the two trial groups.
>> Power Mall Product of Interest: Vitamin D3 (4000 IU) – 100 Capsules

Fear of coronavirus deters strangers from performing CPR

Fox – You don’t have to be infected with the coronavirus to die because of it.
A new study has revealed that people are now less willing to give cardiopulmonary resuscitation, widely known as CPR, on individuals in cardiac arrest out of fear they may unwittingly catch the virus.
A survey of 1,360 people across 26 countries were asked whether they would intervene if a stranger were dying in public, despite the pandemic. Compared to responses taken before the COVID-19 outbreak, 19.5% fewer people are currently willing to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; 14.3% fewer said they would perform chest compressions.
The new research, published in Resuscitation Plus, was gathered after asking social media users to assess their current willingness to save a stranger’s life on a scale from 1 to 100. Questionnaires were conducted before and during the pandemic. Many fear to even approach a stranger, with the amount of people willing to ascertain breathing or a pulse down by 10.7%; the number of people who would use a defibrillator if available decreased by 4.8%.

Prepare for two years of wearing masks, says virologist

Market Watch – The first full day of new coronavirus restrictions in Madrid looked like business as usual for the city’s famed Gran Vía shopping avenue.
But with the advent of a 50% capacity limit on shops, bars and restaurants, a familiar sight had returned on a chilly Saturday afternoon. Reminiscent of a few months ago when Spain was just emerging from a strict lockdown, a line of shoppers snaked outside retailer Zara ITX, -0.04% and an even bigger one stretched down the street in front of Primark ABF, -0.77%.
And even though masks are worn everywhere, all the time now, that 1.5 meter social-distancing measure appears long gone, at a time when Madrid seems to need it most of all.
One has to wonder if this is what warring Spanish politicians had in mind with new rules that kicked in last Friday evening, as the more than 6 million residents of the Madrid region find themselves once again at the epicenter of Europe’s second big coronavirus outbreak.

Unique Glucosinolates Found in Moringa

Mercola – Glucosinolates are sulfur-containing phytochemicals most notably found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage and Brussels sprouts. But research shows that Moringa, also known as the drumstick tree or the horseradish tree, is also high in these health-promoting compounds.
According to a May 2018 report published in Scientific Reports,1 Moringa not only contains high levels of glucosinolates, but also has unique glucosinolates that are responsible for many of its medicinal properties.
Glucosinolates, which are inert, are metabolized into bioactive isothiocyanates by an enzyme called myrosinase.2 The primary isothiocyanate in Moringa responsible for many of its health benefits is moringin,3 created by hydrolysis of glucomoringin.4
Moringin is also known as 4RBITC (after its chemical name, 4-(alpha-L-rhamnopyranosyloxy)benzyl isothiocyanate). Like sulforaphane in broccoli, moringin has potent anti-inflammatory and cytoprotective effects.5
According to Jed Fahey, a nutritional biochemist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, moringina is just as potent as sulforaphane, and in some assays actually more potent.