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~ Featuring ~

Poison Policy: An Unfair Housing

Regulation Leftover From the scumbag/liar-nObama Era Creates Unnecessary Chaos

Hans von Spakovsky

Coronavirus has 'stable genome,' study

suggests, so vaccine could help

'over many years'

By Chris Ciaccia

{ foxnews.com } ~ Currently, there is no known specific medicine to treat the novel coronavirus, but researchers in Italy suggest that the COVID-19 disease is slow to mutate, based on its genetic material... This finding could aid in helping large swaths of people over an extended period of time once a specific cure is found. The study, which was produced by two independent teams in the country, used "a new next-generation sequencing (NGS) research assay" from Thermo Fisher Scientific on Italian COVID-19 patients. The experts then compared them to a sample from the original outbreak to come up with their findings. "Had we investigated other viruses we might have expected up to dozens of new mutations after so many infectious cycles in patients," professor Stefano Menzo, head of Virology at Ancona University Hospital, said in a statement. "Our initial data show that this is a very stable RNA virus, with only five novel variants. A virus with a stable genome is good news for vaccine development because it indicates that the effectiveness of vaccines could be more consistent, possibly over many years."Dr. Maria Rosaria Capobianchi, head of the Virology Department, Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases, said the ability to run quick, multiple samples is important in the scientific community's fight to stay ahead of the virus. However, Capobianchi cautioned, "viral genomes are dynamic and these preliminary data need further analysis to determine the biological significance of the gene variants and to investigate the evolutionary path of the coronavirus." The researchers will further analyze the data with Thermo Fisher's new Ion SARS-CoV-2 analysis solution to better understand the virus and analyze the entire genome. Scientists are looking at a number of different ways to cure the novel coronavirus, which has affected more than 428,000 people around the globe, including at least 55,000 in the U.S. Researchers in France detailed how a combination of antimalarial medication and antibiotics could be a vital weapon against COVID-19, Fox News previously reported. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday the state will start coronavirus drug trials, as the hard-hit state recently acquired 70,000 doses of hydroxychloroquine, 10,000 doses of zithromax and 750,000 doses of chloroquine. On Monday, Cuomo also said the state is attempting to fight the outbreak by using the blood plasma of recovered patients. https://www.foxnews.com/science/coronavirus-has-stable-genome-study-vaccine-could-help-over-many-years

VIDEO: https://video.foxnews.com/v/6144625824001#sp=show-clips

Hundreds Die in Iran After

Drinking Poison ‘Cure’ for Coronavirus

By Jim Hayek

{ americantruthtoday.com } ~ Standing over the still body of an intubated 5-year-old boy wearing nothing but a plastic diaper, an Iranian health care worker in a hazmat suit and mask begged the public for just one thing... Stop drinking industrial alcohol over fears about the new coronavirus. The boy, now blind after his parents gave him toxic methanol in the mistaken belief it protects against the virus, is just one of hundreds of victims of an epidemic inside the pandemic now gripping Iran. Iranian media report nearly 300 people have been killed and more than 1,000 sickened so far by ingesting methanol across the Islamic Republic, where drinking alcohol is banned and where those who do rely on bootleggers. An Iranian doctor helping the country’s Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Friday the problem was even greater, giving a death toll of around 480 with 2,850 people sickened. The poisonings come as fake remedies spread across social media in Iran, where people remain deeply suspicious of the government after it downplayed the crisis for days before it overwhelmed the country. “Other countries have only one problem, which is the new coronavirus pandemic. But we are fighting on two fronts here,” said Dr. Hossein Hassanian, an adviser to Iran’s Health Ministry who gave the higher figures to the AP. “We have to both cure the people with alcohol poisoning and also fight the coronavirus.” For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death. The pandemic has swept across the world, overwhelming hospitals, crippling economies and forcing governments to restrict the movements of billions of people. Particularly hard hit has been Iran, home to 80 million people. As of now, there is no known cure for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus. Scientists and doctors continue to study the virus and search for effective medicines and a vaccine. But in messages forwarded and forwarded again, Iranian social media accounts in Farsi falsely suggested a British school teacher and others cured themselves of the coronavirus with whiskey and honey, based on a tabloid story from early February. Mixed with messages about the use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers, some wrongly believed drinking high-proof alcohol would kill the virus in their bodies... https://americantruthtoday.com/politics/2020/03/27/hundreds-die-in-iran-after-drinking-poison-cure-for-coronavirus/?utm_source=sprklst&utm_campaign=patriothill-hundreds-03_27-mid

Fact Check: Your Stimulus Benefits

by rightwing.org ~ Just before midnight on Wednesday, the Senate unanimously passed a historic economic stimulus package to help American workers, businesses, and the health care system affected by COVID-19... The $2 trillion economic package was passed by a vote of 96-0. On Twitter, President Trump congratulated America: Leading up to the vote, there was a lot of information — and misinformation — about the proposed deal as the White House, Republicans, and Democrats negotiated the terms. Some of the suggestions came to be while other pieces dropped off, leading to confusion as to what’s really included in the deal. We’re hoping this clears it up for you. For days, there were stories about student loan forgiveness, mortgage payment deferments, and other stimulus moves that could help Americans. At the last minute, four Republican Senators expressed concerns about additional payments to laid-off workers. The worry is that they’d receive more money not working than they did while employed and choose to stay home. Unfortunately, there isn’t any help if you were hoping for student loan forgiveness or mortgage payment deferments. So what’s really in this bill that affects you? Direct Cash Payments: A one-time direct payment of up to $1,200 for individuals. Payments start to phase out with income levels above $75,000. If you made more than $99,000 you will not get a stimulus check. A one-time direct payment of up to $2,400 for married couples, who made under $150,000 combined. Payments start to phase out above the $150,000 combined income mark. A one-time direct payment of $500 for every dependent child if you meet income thresholds. A one-time direct payment of $1,200 if you file your taxes as a head of household. In addition, you’ll get $500 for every dependent child. The main difference here is that instead of a $99,000 income threshold, it increases to $112,000. If you filed your 2019 tax return, it’ll be used to determine eligibility. If not, 2018 tax returns will be used. Unemployment: Unemployment benefits are extended from 26 weeks to 39 weeks. $600 per week will be given in addition to regular unemployment payments for up to four months. Small Business Owners: Unemployment benefits were extended to self-employed people and independent contractors. $350 billion in loans were created. However, if used on rent, payroll and utilities, the loans used toward those expenses become a grant that does not have to be paid back. Small business loans max out at $10 million. Student Loans: Student loan payments will be suspended through September 30th. There’s no need to apply for a forbearance or deferment, this suspension is automatic. https://www.rightwing.org/fact-check-your-stimulus-benefits/?utm_source=rw-aw-cf&utm_placement=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_content=RWnewsletter

liar-Speaker Pelosi called out for

a provable lie about the stimulus

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By M. Dowling

{ independentsentinel.com } ~ liar-Speaker Pelosi lied on the House floor. She does that to get the soundbite out. As she has said, she will do whatever it takes to win... “A few minutes ago the liar-Speaker stood at this podium and claimed that House Democrats did what she called, a jujitsu to change the bill — that is an outright lie,” McCarthy said.“The fundamental portions of this bill has [sic] not changed since Sunday.” McCarthy continued, “Four months for unemployment was already decided on Sunday. The grant to keep employees hired in small business was already decided on Sunday.” “The only few additions were funding of things that had nothing to do with the Coronavirus,” he added. Having read the bill, I can say House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is correct. liar-Nancy Pelosi tried to put through a fully socialist bill. It included extreme socialist agenda items which are now out of the bill... https://www.independentsentinel.com/speaker-pelosi-called-out-for-a-provable-lie-about-the-stimulus/

The coronavirus isn’t mutating quickly,

suggesting a vaccine would offer

lasting protection

By Joel Achenbach

{ washingtonpost.com } ~ The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen’s genetic code... That relative stability suggests the virus is less likely to become more or less dangerous as it spreads, and represents encouraging news for researchers hoping to create a long-lasting vaccine. All viruses evolve over time, accumulating mutations as they replicate imperfectly inside a host’s cells in tremendous numbers and then spread through a population, with some of those mutations persisting through natural selection. The new coronavirus has proofreading machinery, however, and that reduces the “error rate” and the pace of mutation. It looks pretty much the same everywhere it has appeared, the scientists say, and there is no evidence that some strains are deadlier than others. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease covid-19, is similar to coronaviruses that circulate naturally in bats. It jumped into the human species last year in Wuhan, China, probably through an intermediate species — possibly a pangolin, an endangered anteater whose scales are trafficked for traditional medicine. Scientists now are studying more than 1,000 different samples of the virus, Peter Thielen, a molecular geneticist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who has been studying the virus, told The Washington Post. There are only about four to 10 genetic differences between the strains that have infected people in the United States and the original virus that spread in Wuhan, he said. “That’s a relatively small number of mutations for having passed through a large number of people,” Thielen said. “At this point, the mutation rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year like the flu vaccine.” It would be more like the measles or chickenpox vaccines, he said — something that would likely confer immunity for a long time. “I would expect a vaccine for coronavirus would have a similar profile to those vaccines. It’s great news,” Thielen said. Several vaccines against covid-19 are in development, but experts estimate it will be at least a year to 18 months before one becomes available. Two other virologists, Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa and Benjamin Neuman of Texas A&M University at Texarkana, both of whom were on the international committee that named the coronavirus, told The Post that the virus appears relatively stable... https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-coronavirus-isnt-mutating-quickly-suggesting-a-vaccine-would-offer-lasting-protection/2020/03/24/406522d6-6dfd-11ea-b148-e4ce3fbd85b5_story.html

200 new doctors, nurses to

join military medical ranks early

by health.mil ~ More than 200 military medical students and graduate nursing students from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, known as USU, will be graduating early... to support their colleagues in the U.S. military health system amid the global coronavirus pandemic. USU President Dr. Richard Thomas made the decision when the national emergency was declared, officials said. "Our curriculum has a specific focus on threats like emerging infectious diseases and disasters that our military and Public Health Service forces are likely to encounter in the course of their careers," Thomas said. "This instruction is based on real-life lessons learned, is woven throughout the curriculum and incorporated into our medical field exercises." USU's students are uniquely prepared to meet and address the readiness needs of the Defense Department and the nation the moment they step out of the university's doors, Thomas said. "This is exactly what they were educated and trained to do," he added. The surgeon generals of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Public Health Service will receive a competent cadre of health care professionals who can augment current resources available to them." The students, who are all active duty uniformed officers in the Army, Navy, Air Force or Public Health Service, will have completed all of their requirements to be awarded a degree and will be available for reassignment by their respective services, officials said. The officers include physicians; family health, mental health and women's health nurse practitioners; clinical nurse specialists and certified registered nurse anesthetists. USU is the nation's only federal health sciences university.

https://health.mil/News/Articles/2020/03/27/200-new-doctors-nurses-to-join-military-medical-ranks-early

Poison Policy: An Unfair Housing Regulation Leftover From the scumbag/liar-nObama Era Creates Unnecessary Chaos

Hans von Spakovsky

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is making a very big mistake. It’s trying to modify an onerous scumbag/liar-nObama-era regulation that would take over local zoning instead of just getting rid of the regulation in its entirety. But it is not too late for HUD to reverse course, and President Donald Trump should ensure that it does.

The effort to reverse this HUD regulation demonstrates that Trump’s true legacy may not depend so much on the high-profile battles that seize the spotlight. No, his long-term impact may very well be measured by his success in ridding us of burdensome federal rules, regulations, and bureaucratic overreach that intrude into our daily lives, stunt the growth of our economy, limit entrepreneurship, and encroach on the power of state and local governments.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has chosen to roll back only some of the worst aspects of the 2015 mandate, rather than eliminate the program altogether. HUD, led by Ben Carson, should reconsider. Timidity will not help the president drain the federal swamp that threatens to engulf local towns and suburbs all over the country and turn HUD into the national zoning authority.

AFFH is bad. As Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote when scumbag/liar-nObama first issued it, “this new regulation is designed to give unelected, anonymous bureaucrats in Washington the power to pick and choose who your new next-door neighbor will be. If they don’t believe your neighborhood is ‘diverse’ enough, they will seize control of local zoning decisions — choosing what should be built, where, and who should pay for it — in order to make your neighborhood look more like they want it to.”

Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center correctly summarized AFFH. It gives the federal government “a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education.”

AFFH’s reach is so widespread because so many communities have become far too dependent on such HUD programs as Community Development Block Grants. If a local town or city wants federal housing funding, then it would have to comply with AFFH. The mandate’s egregiousness was magnified by its use of the dubious legal theory known as “disparate impact.”

This doctrine is used to tar policies and general practices that are entirely and wholly race-neutral as discriminatory, even if there is no proof of any discriminatory intent whatsoever. If said policies somehow have a disproportionate impact on categories of Americans deemed protected by the federal government, they are defined as discriminatory and thus illegal.

Some 377 pages long, AFFH rightly came into the sights of Ben Carson’s HUD soon after the change in administrations. In 2018, Carson’s HUD announced the withdrawal of the 2015 mandate’s so-called “Local Government Assessment Tools,” in which communities had to report non-housing related information. This would then be used by HUD to judge the efforts to “diversify” their communities. If federal bureaucrats believed a community was not sufficiently “diversified,” the local jurisdiction would not get federal funds that are intended to provide affordable housing.

Under the revised, proposed rule recently released, HUD concluded that the prior scumbag/liar-nObama assessment tools “required significant resources from program participants, and its complexity and demands resulted in a high failure rate for jurisdictions.”

They required local officials to answer ninety-two questions on such topics as “significant disparities in access to opportunities, and disproportionate housing needs.” The local officials also had to analyze and report data on such issues as “access to public transportation, quality schools and jobs … [and] environmental health hazards,” topics far afield from the issue of whether there is affordable housing in a particular community.

The new rule says that its goal is to provide “access to housing” and “improved housing conditions,” as opposed to racial diversity. But it still lists a long series of factors that HUD considers “inherent barriers to fair housing choice” that clearly go far outside the issue of affordable housing and interfere with local decisions on zoning and community development.

That includes things like “unduly rigorous design standards” for housing; “unduly prescriptive or burdensome building and rehabilitation codes;” “arbitrary or excessive energy and water efficiency standards;” “source of income restrictions on rental housing;” “time-consuming construction or rehabilitation permitting and review procedures;” and “administrative procedures which have the effect of … impeding the approval of affordable housing development;” etc.

In other words, a local community may be denied federal housing funds if it believes it is in the best interests of its residents to have high-quality housing that is both energy and water-efficient. Or if it thinks landlords should have the ability to make their own decisions on the creditworthiness and ability of tenants to pay their rent. Or if a town wants to carefully review and approve the work of contractors to protect its residents. So, just like the Obama rule, the new proposed rule will once again force local communities that want HUD money to change their zoning rules and administrative procedures.

What is particularly irksome about this regulation is that it appears to violate federal law. 42 U.S.C. §12711 — “Protection of State and local authority” — specifically bars HUD from conditioning federal housing assistance on the type of conditions outlined in the new rule that interferes with a state or local “public policy, regulation, or law.”

The purpose of the federal money appropriated by Congress for HUD is to provide local communities with the funds necessary to build housing that Americans at the lower end of the socioeconomic level can afford. The only rule that HUD should have in place to decide what jurisdiction will receive these grants is whether they will be used to increase the supply of affordable housing. End of story.

It is by overturning such monstrosities as AFFH and the disparate impact standard that the Trump administration will make its mark in history. Secretary Carson and other members of the administration should bear this in mind. ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/69434?mailing_id=4940&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4940&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

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