Month: January 2022

Via The Epoch Times,

Britons have been warned to expect freezing conditions in the coming days, as the record-breaking mild weather over Christmas and the new year is replaced by sub-zero temperatures.

A cold weather alert is in place for most of northern England, with severe icy conditions and potentially heavy snow from midnight on Tuesday into lunchtime on Thursday.

And there are snow, ice and wind warnings in parts of northern Scotland in the coming days, too.

It comes as warm winds from the mid-Atlantic meant temperatures hovered around the 16C mark in parts of the UK at the turn of the year, making it the warmest New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day on record.

Met Office chief meteorologist Neil Armstrong said:

“Following an exceptionally mild spell, temperatures are set to drop for many in the north of England from late on Monday and into Tuesday.

“This drop in temperatures will spread further south later on Tuesday.

“This change is being brought on by a cold northerly flow, which brings with it the risk of some wintry showers in places in northern England, especially over high ground.

“Minimum temperatures over the next few days are expected to drop below freezing, heightening the risk of some ice formation.”

The UK Health Security Agency urged people to check on vulnerable members of the public in the coming days, including the elderly and those with serious illness.

UKHSA consultant Agostinho Sousa said:

“Cold weather can have a serious impact on health, particularly for older people and those with heart and lung problems, as it increases the risks of heart attacks, strokes and chest infections.”

Temperatures are forecast to dip to minus 1C in London on Wednesday night, as well as 0C in Belfast, 1C in Cardiff, and minus 3C in Edinburgh.

South African police said a man has been arrested and charged with arson for starting a fire on Sunday that severely damaged the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town, according to BBC News.

A 49yo old suspect was arrested by an investigative police unit known as Hawks. The suspect will appear in court on Tuesday and face arson, housebreaking, and theft charges. 

Hawks spokesperson Brig Nomthandazo Mbambo told local news eNCA television that the suspect “gained entrance through the window in one of the offices.” There are ongoing investigations into how the suspect entered the parliamentary complex and bypassed security. 

“There is a possibility of other charges being added as there was a security breach here,” Mbambo said.

Jean-Pierre Smith, a Cape Town mayoral committee member responsible for safety and security, said private security and police were not paid overtime and were off duty at the time of the incident. 

Much of the damage resides in the New Assembly Wing of the building, which includes the National Assembly chamber where lawmakers sit. 

Firefighters battled a blaze at the South African parliament for hours before partially containing it. While there were no injuries reported, the fire caused the roof of the building to collapse and ate through an entire floor https://t.co/AuGr2lUKNS pic.twitter.com/mjFIznu5gx

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 2, 2022

Besides no guards, the building’s fire sprinkler system malfunctioned during the time of the incident. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa said the burning of parliament’s lower house was a “terrible and devastating event.” 

Smith said firefighters continued to fight the blaze on Monday. He said there were still “hotspots” and areas in the building still smoldering. 

The fire came one day after Archbishop Desmond Tutu was laid to rest at St George’s Cathedral, a stone’s throw from parliament.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

In what appears to be a cynical PR stunt, the UK government is considering plans to allow women who feel threatened on the street to call upon surveillance drones that would arrive in minutes and shine a bright light on any potential attacker.

What could possibly go wrong?

“Women in fear of an attack will be able to use a phone app to summon a drone, which could arrive within minutes armed with a powerful spotlight and thermal cameras to frighten off any potential assailant,” reports the Telegraph.

Trials will take place on campus at Nottingham University at a cost of £500,000 during which the tech will be used to “protect students and staff.”

The scheme will be submitted to the UK government’s Innovate research program, and could eventually see helicopters being replaced by drones as a front line tool of law enforcement.

“It is a high capability drone that costs just £100 an hour but can do 80 percent of what a police helicopter can do,” said Richard Gill, the founder of Drone Defence.

“It cannot do high speed pursuits but it can do the other tasks such as searching for people and ground surveillance.”

Gill noted that 25 drones could do the job of one police helicopter in London for the same price, with the drones being housed at five base locations across the city.

The idea of countless government drones whizzing around a city keeping tabs on people is garishly dystopian.

Allowing individuals to access the drones would also be completely open to abuse and misuse.

Innumerable people would make a mockery of the system by constantly calling upon the drones to harass random people or use the drones for target practice.

A far more effective means of preventing such attacks would be to allow women to be armed with pepper spray, but current law in the UK makes that illegal.

Changing the law would give women the power to defend themselves while avoiding the dystopian nightmare that state surveillance drones would bring.

The idea of giving women who feel threatened the power to summon drones is patently a cynical PR stunt to acclimatize the public into accepting the general introduction of drones as a tool of mass surveillance.

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Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

I’ve taken a guilty pleasure recently in watching the faux intellectuals on MSNBC and CNN pass judgment on not just Donald Trump, but also on everyone who shares his disdain for authoritarian pronouncements on COVID-19, election integrity, climate change and a host of other issues.

From what I can tell after studying Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Jake Tapper and the late, lamented Chris Cuomo, liberalism today is characterized by a low regard for the intelligence of average Americans and a very high regard for the elastic nature of language.

Essentially, words are expected to mean whatever Democrats and their media enablers want them to mean. This has been most evident in the war against Donald Trump since the 2020 election, but it was certainly in play earlier. For example, saying that Donald Trump is a “racist” meant he supports border security. Saying Donald Trump is a Russian “colluder” meant that Hillary Clinton had paid a British spy to manufacture a phony dossier implicating Trump.

But the campaign to destroy Trump really lifted into the stratosphere after the Nov. 3 election. When they called his claim that the election was stolen “the Big Lie,” what they meant was they don’t agree with him. When they said he made his claims “without evidence,” they meant “without evidence that they agree with” or that they would even look at.

Then — after the Jan. 6 House select committee voted to hold Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress — they pivoted and announced that the Big Lie was now “the Big Coup.” Meadows was chief of staff to President Trump, and since Trump clearly believed the election was stolen, it should be no surprise that Meadows was in constant communication with members of Congress and others who were working to prove that fraud had taken place. But in the Orwellian world of Democrats, trying to prove that fraud was committed by someone else means you are yourself guilty of fraud. Believing the election was stolen means that you yourself tried to steal the election. And worst of all, asking people to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol means that you were instructing them to riot and overthrow the government.

As we approach the anniversary of the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” the unspoken truth is that Donald Trump had nothing to gain and everything to lose by the violent assault on the Capitol that day. The only chance of keeping Trump in the White House was not by invading the Capitol, but by keeping it secure while our representatives debated the validity of the election using the entirely constitutional process taking place inside the halls of Congress.

The electoral votes of at least five states were being challenged — not in a coup, but in a lawful manner also used by Democrats in earlier elections, following the procedures mandated by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Republican senators and House members had lined up to make the case to the public and their fellow constitutional officers that something was rotten in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and that the election was therefore tainted. But the violence outside resulted in a sharply truncated debate inside that was virtually ignored, if not outright mocked or shamed, by the mainstream media. The riot instantly doomed any chance Trump had of prevailing in his argument that the election was stolen.

So ask yourself who benefited from the supposed coup at the Capitol. Not Trump. Not the Republicans who had put themselves on the line to support him with evidence of voting irregularities in several states. Cui bono? Who benefits? None other than the very Democrats who for the last year have worked tirelessly to discredit Trump and to find some way to disqualify him from being elected president again in 2024.

The latest claim is that Trump had criminally “obstructed an official proceeding of Congress” by encouraging his supporters to “Stop the Steal.” This is an absurd claim on several fronts.

First of all, Trump’s belief that the election was stolen is protected by his First Amendment right of free speech. So is his right to use the courts and Congress to seek redress of his grievances. There is no evidence he had advance knowledge of the riot or planned it in any way. As noted, the particular proceeding of Congress in question was the only hope Trump had of remaining in office beyond Jan. 20, 2021.

Moreover, the argument that Trump “allowed” the riot to take place because he did not send National Guard troops to intervene is wrong on both the facts and the logic of the case. As I showed in my last column, Trump did in fact request 10,000 National Guard troops to be deployed, but his request was ignored by the Pentagon, the speaker of the House, the Capitol Police and the mayor of Washington, D.C. Even more importantly, if Trump had used the power of the presidency to order a military presence at the Capitol, then the Democrats would have gotten exactly what they wanted — the appearance of a coup ordered by a reckless, out-of-control authoritarian who was trying to bend Congress to his will. In other words, Trump could not win that day no matter what he did. The violence made victory impossible.

But to argue, as Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi do, that Trump didn’t have a right to contest the election is to replace the rule of law with the rule of intimidation. The Democrats and their partners in the media have used all their assembled might to coerce Trump and his allies into silence. His only crime is that he won’t shut up about the election being stolen. Nor for that matter is he the only one who thinks that the election was fraudulent. Millions of us independently reached the same conclusion. If any of those supporters had turned to violence at the Capitol, they should be appropriately tried, convicted and punished for their misdeeds, but that’s not on Trump any more than it is on the rest of us who encouraged our fellow citizens to work to prevent the installation of Joe Biden as president as long as doubts persisted about his legitimacy.

But the Jan. 6 committee and its supporters don’t care about logic or facts. They trotted out text messages from Trump supporters condemning the violence and said that meant Trump himself must have supported the violence. They showed messages that indicated Trump had a strategy to try to prove to Congress and then to the Supreme Court that his rights had been violated, and they said that proved “the Big Coup.”

Goodness, they really didn’t need to wait this long if that’s all it takes to prove a coup! They could have just read Trump’s speech from the morning of Jan. 6. He never hid the fact that he thought he had been cheated out of victory, nor did he ever pretend he would go gentle into that good night the way Democrats hoped he would. But they already knew all that. In fact, they impeached him over the same speech and failed to convict him. If they tried to convict him on the same charges again, under any guise, they would have violated the intent of the Constitution’s protection against double jeopardy. Not that they care.

One last point: In general, the liberal elites appear to be incapable of recognizing that every argument has two sides. They honestly believe that whatever the Democratic leadership says is true, and whatever Donald Trump or his supporters say is false. Although this condition existed prior to the 2020 election, it was exaggerated afterwards to the point where we no longer have the expectation of honest debate. And that, contrary to the claims of politicians like Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney, is the real danger to democracy.

When half the people are considered by the other half to be malignant, prevaricating miscreants, there is no hope for true democracy — rule by the people. The best you can expect is demi-democracy, rule of the people by half of the people. That may be the hope of the liberals, but they should be careful what they wish for. Despite their frantic attacks on the Deplorables, it is not yet certain who will prevail in the war they have unleashed. Not a war of weapons, but a war of words and a war of ideas.

On the Democrat side, there are threats and intimidation, warning American citizens not to step out of line. Wear your mask. Get your shot. Turn in your gun. Do what we tell you, and keep your head down. You’ll be fine if you obey.

On the other side, there is a rising chorus of voices, moms and dads, black and white, free-thinkers all, who ask for the right to raise their children as they see fit, insist on medical autonomy, expect elections to be fair, and don’t bow before authority unless it is legitimately wielded.

The choice of two diametrically opposed futures has not been so clear since the Civil War, and Democrats — just as they did in that great conflict — seem intent once again on proving the truth of Lincoln’s dictum that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

On Monday, at a time when Shia groups in Iraq and Iran are staging large anti-American rallies to commemorate the Jan.3rd 2020 killing of IRGC General Qassem Soleimani, a pair of armed drones were sent against a military base in Iraq which hosts US forces.

“Two armed drones were shot down as they approached an Iraqi military base hosting US forces near Baghdad’s international airport, Iraqi security sources said, adding that nobody was hurt in the incident,” Al Jazeera reports. It happened at Camp Victory not far from the city’s international airport.

A US official called it “a dangerous attack on a civilian airport,” given the nearby presence of civilian aviation. The official said the base’s defense system thwarted “two fixed-wing suicide drones” that were inbound, but “they were shot down without incident.”

But interestingly one of the drones was marked with the words “Soleimani’s revenge”, according to the report:

Footage provided by the coalition showed what the official said was debris of two fixed-wing drones destroyed in the attack, with writing clearly visible on the wing of one drone reading “Soleimani’s revenge”.

Correction & more pix

Two “Suicide Drones” aimed at Baghdad airport, housing US-led coalition, were shot down by US def system, C-RAM at around 0430 this morning.

On the wings it’s written: “Leader’s revenge” & “Soleimani’s revenge” pic.twitter.com/mdUAOuG4mc

— Nafiseh Kohnavard (@nafisehkBBC) January 3, 2022

Though there were no immediate claims of responsibility, the obvious suspected groups include factions under Iraq’s pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces.

Alongside Soleimani, the Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis also lost his life on that day in the US drone attack two years ago, along with others in the caravan which was driving away from Baghdad International Airport at the time. 

Thousands March towards the Bagdad Airport in Iraq,near the site of Assassination to mark the second Aniversary of General Qasem soleimani and commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis . Both were killed along with associates in a Drone attack by United States.
pic.twitter.com/ZBa7F7rqKR

— Syed Shahriyar (@shahriyarsyed1) January 3, 2022

In Tehran on Monday, Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi vowed a “martyr’s revenge” during a televised address on the second anniversary of Soleimani’s death.

“If Trump and (former secretary of state Mike) Pompeo are not tried in a fair court for the criminal act of assassinating General Soleimani, Muslims will take our martyr’s revenge,” Raisi said according to Reuters. Given this, and the heightened passions and tensions, it’s likely there will be more small scale attacks to come targeting remaining US forces in Iraq this week.

Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

New York City has issued its latest guidance for the distribution of monoclonal antibodies (and other COVID-19 therapeutics) for the treatment of COVID-19. And it looks to your color, not your condition.

For the uninitiated, monoclonal antibodies are recommended by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and have been authorized by the FDA, for the treatment of COVID-19. According to the latest New York City guidelines, monoclonal antibodies are authorized as COVID-19 treatment “for people who have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.”

“Other factors” that increase the risk for serious illness. What could those be?

New York City has the answer:

“Consider race and ethnicity when assessing individual risk, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities may contribute to an increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.”

The distribution of potentially life-saving medications based on the color of a patient’s skin – or, at a minimum, treatments that prevent a COVID-19 patient from life-threatening complications – has already started. According to the New York Post, “one Staten Island doctor said he filled two prescriptions for Paxlovid this week and was asked by the pharmacist to disclose the race of his patients before the treatment was authorized.”

This follows similar reports from other jurisdictions. In Texas, a white patient was denied medication because he didn’t fit the racial “criteria.”

White people are being denied monoclonal antibodies just because they’re white. I never expected this to happen in Texas.

I have a feeling this is the Biden administration way of fighting back against @GregAbbott_TX since they’re mainly in charge of the antibodies. pic.twitter.com/FjTk9R7Cpx

— The Dirty Truth (Josh) (@AKA_RealDirty) November 18, 2021

The New York pharmacists referenced in the New York Post story were apparently unconcerned about the risk factors that transcend races: obesity, age, chronic kidney or liver disease, or diabetes. It was race that mattered. While the New York Post reporting states both patients were white, and that both patients were ultimately “granted” their prescriptions, the concern is that the NYC guidance is more broadly already in practice.

Race-Based Treatments and the Law

This gets us to the issue of the broader legality of “health equity”. While the above paragraphs describe mere “guidance” from New York City health agencies, the administration of treatments and drugs based on race can violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the Department of Justice explains:

“Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., was enacted as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.”

The recipients of “federal financial assistance” may “include hospitals, health clinics, nursing homes, long-term care facilities, alcohol and drug treatment facilities, health research programs, almost all physicians, and Medicaid and Medicare programs.”

Certainly there would be a statutory violation if one of these New York providers received federal funds and used race as a determining factor in providing medications. And if there is, the DOJ explains it is authorized to take action by termination funding or through litigation.

At a minimum, the Biden Department of Justice should be pushing back on race-based treatment. Even if the legality can be debated (depending on whether a provider receives federal funds), the policy itself is certainly evil.

With this ongoing discrimination, and with these options of enforcement, why is the Biden Department of Justice doing nothing?

Perhaps because the Biden Administration is already playing politics with monoclonal antibodies. It recently instituted a dramatic reduction of shipments of monoclonal antibodies to Florida, claiming “such treatments are not effective against the omicron variant of the coronavirus.” As if omicron is the only variant out there. One can’t help but suspect that Florida residents are victimized, and will be victims themselves, because the Democrats don’t want Governor DeSantis (considered by many to be the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner) to succeed.

Or perhaps the Biden Administration allows for discrimination in providing medical care because it condones discrimination overall. Their actions support this theory. Back in October 2020, the Trump DOJ initiated litigation under the same statute (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq.) against Yale for discriminating on the basis of race and national origin. The Biden DOJ dropped the case without explanation in February 2021, two weeks after Biden’s inauguration.

If anything, the New York City policy of “health equity” is line with the Biden Administration’s broader racial equity priorities. The CDC is on the record with supporting “equitable” – and not necessarily equal – access to medical care, including the treatment of COVID-19.

As to the costs of this “health equity”?

It will be measured in lives.

The growing “Let’s Go, Brandon” movement has expanded into a booming retail chain selling anti-President Biden merchandise. Business is thriving, and the small retail chain has big plans across the New England region. 

FOX Business spoke Let’s Go Brandon store owner Keith Lambert, who is opening two new locations in Salisbury and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, increasing locations from eight to 10. Soaring demand for political merchandise comes as the Biden administration’s approval rating tumbled back to near record lows. 

“A customer came into one of our locations [Tuesday] and bought a Let’s Go Brandon sticker and went out to his car and stuck it over his Biden sticker,” Lambert said. “And that was it, he was just like, ‘I’m done with this guy.'”

“People have buyer’s remorse,” he added. “Business is very, very good right now.”

The Let’s Go Brandon movement is a unique response to many Americans’ discontent with the media and the Biden administration. The slogan is a modern equivalent of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” used by the colonists to show their defiance against England. 

Let’s Go Brandon movement began on Oct. 2. Race-car driver Brandon Brown won his first NASCAR Xfinity Series race. During the interview, NBC reporter Kelli Stavast’s questions were drowned out by “F*** Joe Biden” chants. Stavast was quick to declare, “you can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go, Brandon!”

For months, the war cry has taken the nation by storm (see: here & here). People are fed up with the media and, most importantly, the Biden administration. Lambert said the community response to his stores has mainly been positive, but there’s always angry liberals that bombard the store with negative reviews online and message him death threats. 

Lambert’s said he began losing trust with Biden after the botched exit of Afghanistan and the border crisis. 

“His decision-making is not good,” he said. “I don’t think he’s doing the job that he should be doing, and I’m not happy with it, just like a lot of other people are not happy with it.”

Lambert said when Biden leaves office, he’s not worried about anti-liberal merchandise going out of fashion.

“Liberals always get so upset, so there’s always going to be a slogan, a phrase, and the Trump brand isn’t going anywhere. People still buy lots of Trump merchandise, and especially if he runs again, I’m sure we’ll be able to stay open and keep moving with that stuff,” he said. 

Let’s Go Brandon is a rallying cry of defiance and is a way for many to tell both the president and the media to “mind the music and the step” because they are marching to a different tune than the American people. 

Authored by Jan Jekielek and Masooma Haq via The Epoch Times,

Dr. Peter McCullough told The Epoch Times that the public should question why the governments and public health officials around the world have put little to no emphasis on outpatient treatments in their efforts to fight the COVID-19 virus, instead promoting a massive effort on vaccines.

“Lots of messaging on the vaccine, but zero mentioning on treatment, none. And it’s been from the very beginning. There is a theme here, I hope everyone’s starting to get the theme. There is zero effort, interest, promotion, or care about early treatment, people who are sick with COVID-19,” said McCollough.

“But there is a complete and total focus on people who don’t have COVID-19 and giving them a vaccine.”

McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and lead author of the first paper on early COVID-19 outpatient treatment involving a multi-drug regimen. In a recent interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program, he discussed a wide range of evidence on COVID-19 preventative treatments that are being used around the world.

He said that drug treatments must be prioritized in the effort to stamp out the threat of COVID-19. “So early treatment markedly changes spreads. So, we reduce new cases, we reduce the intensity and severity and duration of symptoms. And by that mechanism, we reduce hospitalization and death.”

The doctor cited some recent treatments that have been effective in killing the virus at the early stage of infection: Dr. Iqbal Mahmud Chowdhury conducted a protocol in Bangladesh that used a povidone-iodine rinse in the nose and eyes to kill the virus. Another treatment effort by a French doctor, Didier Raoult, who treated people using hydroxychloroquine, met with great success.

“Chowdhury is the first author recognizing the fact that the virus is in the air, people breathe it in, it settles in the nose, and it begins to replicate. And it has to get to a certain threshold and overcome the other organisms in the nose and overcome our own immune system to become a clinical infection. So, there’s about a three-to-five-day window to actually zap the virus directly.”

Masks and hand sanitizer are illogical and the data does not show them to be effective means to prevent COVID-19 infections because the virus is spread through the air, not hands, and is too small to be blocked by most masks said, McCollough.

McCollough said COVID creates “terrible inflammation” and hydroxychloroquine has been shown to be effective to reduce that, but instead of seeing an increase in using and studying the effectiveness of that drug, it has instead been restricted and in some countries, doctors can be jailed for using it to treat their patients.

A map of where hydroxychloroquine is currently being used around the world for COVID-19 on March 1. (Courtesy of c19study.org)

In the United States, hydroxychloroquine can only be used in hospitals.

McCollough detailed the events that led to these restrictions, saying that for one, “there was a falsified paper published in Lancet … which claimed to have tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19, hospitalized at multiple centers around the world, in their 40s, hospitalized with COVID-19.” He said the supposed study was not verified and claimed the drug had negative health effects.

This “false” study led to medical professionals losing confidence in the drug and after which, “hospital messaging started to say, listen, don’t use hydroxychloroquine.

“The NIH pulled the program on a fully-funded trial in the midst of our initial wave of COVID-19. And then, shortly after that, the FDA put out a statement: hydroxychloroquine should not be used across the board, period.

“The next drug up on the block was Ivermectin.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the NIH to ask what they thought of Dr. McCullough’s criticism of the NIH’s COVID-19 treatment guidelines. The NIH spokesperson declined to comment. She said that the NIH relied on a panel of many experts to develop the COVID-19 treatment guidelines.

The FDA told The Epoch Times they are committed “to speed patient access to medicines to prevent or treat COVID-19 provided they meet the agency’s rigorous standards,” but that they believe the vaccines are the best way to prevent the disease and hospitalization.

McCollough says along with anti-hydroxychloroquine messaging, the drug Ivermectin was also maligned after that the American Medical Association gave an opinion against it.

“So, Americans saw the most confusing picture of hospitalized care of COVID-19 and a very confusing picture of outpatient treatment of COVID-19. My contributions, at least I tried to organize the outpatient treatment into concepts, where we would use drugs … in the middle phase treat inflammation, and in the late phase treat blood clotting; and we stuck with those principles all the way through,” said McCollough.

McCollough said it’s highly unusual for hospitals to not conduct trials on treatments for a disease, but with COVID-19 no major trials have been done to improve treatments and there have been no outcomes publicized by hospitals.

McCollough said improving treatments for those who are sick with COVID-19 has never been a priority for those in charge of public health because vaccines have been pushed from day one. He remembers how CVS pharmacies were advertising the vaccines even before they were fully authorized.

CVS confirmed to The Epoch Times that they were advertising the vaccines in October 2020.

A sign at a drug store advertises the COVID-19 vaccine in New York City on Nov. 19, 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

He said the U.S. media has almost completely blocked out what is going on around the world with treatments for COVID. “Anywhere where there has been an early oral drug approach there has been success in terms of COVID-19. And now more recently, it was very fascinating, is anywhere where there’s any attention to decontamination in the nose and the mouth with direct by virucidal therapy. There have been stunning results.”

He questions why the United States has not reviewed the work being done around the world to treat the disease.

“We haven’t seen panels of collaborating doctors. We’ve never seen a symposium on local therapy, what works best for the nose. No mention by public health officials.”

McCollough says those leading U.S. public health agencies are incompetent.

McCollough suggests that there be a monthly review of new therapies used to treat COVID both at a national and global level, for doctors to review and learn from peers. “The idea that there’s no review, you’d think there would be the World Health Organization would actually assign a task force. This is the biggest public health problem, a monthly review of promising therapies.”

“So the treatment, inpatient and outpatient, of the biggest illness of our time, after two years, is an enigma.”

U.S. natural gas futures rose late in the session on new data that showed a plunge in pipeline gas flows in Texas, which indicates the state’s power grid could be susceptible to failures amid a cold snap. 

Front-month gas futures are up more than 3% to $3.84 around 1445 ET as commodity traders assess the situation in Texas. 

“Production of the heating and power generation fuel in Texas fell on Sunday to the lowest since February’s freeze — when millions were sent into the dark for days — after temperatures plunged,” BloombergNEF pipeline data showed. Flows are expected to rebound when temperatures rebound. 

Temperatures in The Lone Star State are expected to rebound in the coming days. 

However, warmer weather might not return to much of the U.S. until next Tuesday. Mean temperatures will oscillate around a 30-year average for the next eight days, occasionally dipping to below-average levels. The coldest point is between Jan. 8-11. 

Heating degree days for the U.S. show cold weather will increase the demand for energy to heat building structures. 

A plunge in gas supplies comes right after the Electric Reliability Council (ERCOT) of Texas said the power grid is “winterized and ready to provide power.” 

Last February, a cold snap froze wellhead across the state that parazyled gas flows. Power plants couldn’t get enough fuel to spin turbines, and combine that with extraordinarily high power demand from customers to stay warm, the grid was minutes from collapse — forcing ERCOT, the grid operator — to implement rolling blackouts. 

Despite ERCOT’s confidence that grid stability can be achieved this winter, keep an eye on Texas and pray for warmer weather; if not, another energy crisis could be nearing.