Shelby County Health Department Admits COVID-19 Funding Pulled by Trump Admin Used for ‘Mpox,’ ‘Other Infectious Diseases’

Michelle Taylor

The Director of Health in Shelby County, Tennessee, acknowledged on Thursday that pandemic-era grant money, pulled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and the Trump administration, was being used to treat diseases other than COVID-19.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) informed the public that more than $11 billion in COVID-19 grant money was scheduled to recalled by the agency in March, when HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon declaring the “pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

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Hegseth Calls Biden’s Military COVID Vax Mandate ‘Unlawful,’ Provides Guidance to Restore Careers

vaccine military

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the Biden administration’s military COVID-19 vaccine mandate “unlawful,” and issued a memo directing Pentagon officials to reinstate service members affected by it and remove any related disciplinary actions from their record.

Hegseth’s announcement on Wednesday follows Trump’s executive order from January reinstating military members who were discharged for refusing to follow the Defense Department’s COVID vaccine mandate implemented by the Biden administration.

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Service Members May Lose Jobs After Religious Exemptions for Flu Vax Denied, Fought COVID Mandate

Military vaccine

Two service members have been denied religious exemptions to the flu vaccine and are at risk of being forced out of the military after they previously fought the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

A service member in the Marine Corps and another in the Air Force are facing separation from their respective military branches after submitting Religious Accommodation Requests (RARs) for the flu shot. Both men objected to the COVID vaccine mandate under the Biden administration and ultimately kept their jobs, but they may lose them under President Trump despite the routine approval of religious exemptions for vaccines before COVID.

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‘The Pandemic Is Over’: All NIH COVID Grants Eliminated Under New Directive

researcher in lab

A two-sentence paragraph in a new guidance document to National Institutes of Health grant managers brings a five-year surge of COVID-19 research funding to a screeching halt.

Chief grants management specialists at each of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers have been instructed to “completely excise” grants that clash with the Trump administration’s priorities. A Tuesday NIH directive broadens the categories of research that clash with the administration’s priorities to include research on COVID-19, according to Nature magazine.

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Still Searching for COVID-19 Origins Five Years After ‘Proximal Origin’ Paper Tried to End Debate

Anthony Fauci

Half a decade after the start of a global pandemic, the Trump Administration has begun a renewed push to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID-19, with more and more evidence — including by non-U.S. intelligence agencies — indicating that it came from the Wuhan lab.

Exactly five years ago today, an influential scientific Proximal Origin paper was published pushing back on the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Emails show Dr. Anthony Fauci, the now-former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “prompted” the writing of that influential article.

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Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Moves Closer to Leading the NIH After Party-Line Senate Committee Vote

Bhattacharya Confirmed by HELP Committee

In a narrow 12-11 vote split along party lines, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee on Thursday advanced the nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to become the next director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With all Republicans voting in favor, the nomination now heads to the full Senate for a floor vote, marking a significant step in Bhattacharya’s journey from ostracized academic to potential leader of one of the nation’s premier scientific institutions.

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German Government Reportedly Concealed Intel That Wuhan Lab Leak Was ’80 to 95 Percent’ Likely

The German government for years concealed an assessment by its Foreign Intelligence Service that a lab origin of COVID-19 was overwhelmingly likely, according to a Tuesday investigative report by two German newspapers.

The investigation, published jointly by Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, claims that German intelligence (BND) met in Berlin within weeks of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in early 2020 for a mission dubbed “Project Saaremaa” — named after an Estonian Baltic Sea island.

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NIH Nominee Bhattacharya Threatens Senate Status Quo: ‘Science Should Be an Engine for Freedom’

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Senate Democrats and some Republicans liked the status quo at the National Institutes of Health before the second Trump administration and Department of Government Efficiency started closely scrutinizing its grant decisions, headcount and wildly generous reimbursement for “indirect costs” to institutions at the expense of money for their researchers

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New Scientific Journal by ‘RealClearPolitics’ Parent Foundation Aims to Revolutionize Public Health Publishing

RealClearFoundation launches Journal of the Academy of Public Health

The RealClearFoundation – parent of RealClearPolitics – announced on Wednesday the launch of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health (JAPH). The journal aims to start a new chapter in the world of scientific publishing and shake up the field of public health with a commitment to open access, transparency, and scholarly inclusivity.

Leading the charge are co-founders Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff. Dr. Kulldorff now co-leads the journal as Editor-in-Chief with Dr. Andrew Noymer of the University of California, Irvine. Their vision, articulated in Kulldorff’s inaugural paper “The Rise and Fall of Scientific Journals and a Way Forward,” is to reform how scientific research is shared and critiqued.

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Report: President-Elect Trump Plans Many Ambitious Executive Orders on Immigration

Donald Trump

President-elect Donald Trump reportedly has plans to issue as many as 100 executive orders on his first day in office, dealing with a wide range of topics including his signature issue of immigration.

According to Axios, the president-elect and his advisors detailed these plans during a meeting with Senate Republicans on Wednesday. Among those present at the meeting was Stephen Miller, who has been designated as the Chief of Staff for Policy in Trump’s second presidency, as well as the advisor for homeland security.

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COVID Catechists Come for Incoming NIH Chief Bhattacharya as SCOTUS Reconsiders Doctor Censorship

Jay Bhattacharya, M.D.

Proponents of once-dominant COVID-19 views and policy, from the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 to mandatory lockdowns, remote learning, masking and vaccines, often chose between two strategies to marginalize dissenters.

They flooded medical licensing boards with complaints against doctors such as Minnesota’s Scott Jensen, who faced new investigations from Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s administration after announcing his candidacy for governor, or sought to destroy their reputations in general, scientific and social media, calling them racist, cold-hearted and “fringe.”

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Feds Quietly Ban Liability for Vax Makers Through Trump’s Full Term as FDA Exposes RSV Trial Harm

Vaccine

The federal government is protecting the manufacturers of COVID-19 and flu vaccines from product liability for another five years, on the cusp of a new administration likely to aggressively look for vaccine injuries and release its hidden books that Just the News went to court to obtain.

Didn’t hear about it? That’s because the Department of Health and Human Services does not appear to have told the public outside a Dec. 11 Federal Register notice, primarily read by regulated entities, and a generic page buried deep within HHS’s website.

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Tennessee Tax Preparers Allegedly Defrauded $65 Million in COVID-19 Relief Funds for Clients, Kept Commissions

Renata Walton

Two Mississippi women were indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) after they allegedly helped their clients obtain $65 million in pandemic relief funding, collecting commissions in the process, through their West Tennessee tax preparation business.

The DOJ announced on Wednesday that a Memphis grand jury returned a 53-count indictment charging Renata Walton and Nicole Jones, who both live in Olive Branch, Mississippi, with falsifying business and personal tax returns to obtain significant payments of relief funds designed for individuals and employers during the COVID-19 pandemic through their company, R&B Tax Express, in Moscow, Tennessee.

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Operation Warp Speed Official Questions COVID Vaccine Purity, Worries ‘They May Ingrate’ into DNA

Lab Research

COVID-19 vaccine supporters are fond of sneering at public figures who have called for the Food and Drug Administration to pull or at least re-evaluate the safety of the increasingly unpopular therapeutics, such as Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cardiologist Peter McCullough and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

They might have a harder time caricaturing a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director who ran the agency when COVID vaccines were being developed, promoted vaccination and repeat boosting as recently as 2022 and promoted cloth face masks as “one of the most powerful weapons we have” against COVID, before vaccines were available.

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Operation Warp Speed Official Questions COVID Vaccine Purity, Worries ‘They May Ingrate’ into DNA

Dr. Robert Redfield addresses a presidential briefing with Trump, Fauci, Mick Mulvaney, and others

COVID-19 vaccine supporters are fond of sneering at public figures who have called for the Food and Drug Administration to pull or at least re-evaluate the safety of the increasingly unpopular therapeutics, such as Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cardiologist Peter McCullough and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

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Acclaimed Medical Center Appears to Bury Data Undermining COVID-Heart Risk Study

COVID Vaccine

With federal authorities recognizing the plunge in COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness as early as four months after each jab, which may actually increase the risk of subsequent infection, the public health establishment is trying to rekindle Americans’ interest in a so-called layered mitigation strategy to keep COVID infections at bay.

While it leans into one-size-fits-all vaccination as the best way to avoid severe outcomes from an increasingly mild virus with near-total natural immunity nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends wearing any kind of mask and social distancing as an “additional prevention strategy.” 

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Double-Barreled Hurricane Crisis Exposes FEMA’s Chronic Leadership, Staffing Problems

Hurricane Milton / NOAA

On the eve of Hurricane Milton’s landfall on a disaster-weary Florida, FEMA, the nation’s disaster relief agency reported a stark shortage of frontline workers available to be deployed: just 8% of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s vaunted Incident Management personnel were still available for deployment.

The stunning declaration in Wednesday’s Daily Operations Briefing exposed the longtime impact of FEMA’s expanding work on unrelated missions like COVID funerals and illegal immigrant services, a crisis created by a worker shortage, a workforce morale issue and the reality of burnout from a increasingly frenetic natural disaster pace.

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Commentary: Vaccine Ad Blitz Sidestepped Transparency Rules

COVID Shot

“A bun in the toaster oven,” a woman exclaims off-camera, handing an ultrasound image to family members who erupt into tearful emotion over the news. “Oh my God!” 

The touching baby announcement video then gets down to business as text appears on the screen amidst the ongoing celebration, suggesting the best way to stay alive for this joyous birth is by becoming vaccinated against COVID-19. “Why will you get vaccinated? …  Because some people you just want to meet in person.” 

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Billions Gone and Little to Show for It Years After Rampant COVID Fraud

Capitol Money

Years after the passage of federal COVID-era relief and the subsequent loss of likely hundreds of billions of those taxpayer dollars, lawmakers are still unsure where that money went, how to get it back, and seemingly have done little to prevent it from happening again.

Federal watchdog and other reports estimate anywhere from $200 billion to half a trillion was lost to waste, fraud and abuse across various federal and state COVID-era programs.

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Pro-Vaccine Doctors Skeptical of New COVID-19 Boosters: ‘I’d Really Like to See the Data’

Vaccine

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pushing new COVID-19 boosters, claiming that people who don’t stay “up to date” with shots – regardless of how many they’ve already taken – “are more likely to get very sick” while those who take them annually are “much less likely to get very ill, be hospitalized, or even die” from COVID.

The Democratic nominee for president is so committed to staying up to date on jabs that Vice President Kamala Harris made COVID boosting a requirement to work on her campaign, “unless otherwise prohibited by applicable law.” They can also ask the human resources department for a “reasonable accommodation … prior to reporting to an office location.”

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Commentary: The Grueling and Expensive Journey to Treat Vaccine Injury

Moderna Vaccine

$40,000.

That’s how much Kate Zerby has spent trying to put herself back together after the Moderna COVID vaccine wreaked havoc on her body.

As Intellectual Takeout reported back in 2022, Kate Zerby of St. Paul, Minnesota, suffered a serious adverse reaction to her Moderna shot, beginning the night after she got it, February 16, 2021. At 3:30 a.m., she awoke, gripped by a pervading sense of gloom and foreboding and the unsettling sensation that something strange was slithering through her system. At the same time, an interior voice seemed to tell her, “If you get the vaccine again, you will die.”

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Report: Ohio Wage Hikes Can’t Keep Up with Inflation

Food Workers

A new report shows a massive dump of federal taxpayer dollars into Ohio following the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2021 recession led to the largest wage increase in more than 40 years, but it wasn’t enough for workers to keep up with the “effective” rate of inflation.

Policy Matters Ohio’s State of Working Ohio report, scheduled to be released Tuesday afternoon, showed the federal COVID-19 recovery plan put Ohioans back to work at a level with prerecession numbers and gave jobseekers their pick of potential jobs.

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Commentary: Law Enforcement Collapse Masks Rising Crime Rates

Criminals smashing a window

Law enforcement in the United States has collapsed. Americans in many parts of the country see that products at CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart stores are behind plexiglass, that you must call a clerk to unlock the glass and then wait while you read and examine the different packages. People know these companies have no choice. Americans know that crime is rising, but the true collapse in law enforcement, particularly in large cities, is without precedent.

A Gallup survey last November showed that 92 percent of Republicans and even 58 percent of Democrats believed that crime was rising. In a series of surveys from March 2023 to April 2024, Rasmussen Reports finds a remarkably constant percentage of Americans who believe that violent crime is getting worse – 60 percent to 61 percent. Roughly four times as many people think violent crime is rising rather than getting better.

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Commentary: Biden-Harris Admin Uses Loopholes to Expand Welfare Benefits, Again

Family using a Tablet

It seems reasonable that a program designed to assist those with low incomes should go only to low-income households. But the Biden-Harris administration is using a dubious mechanism to get around that expectation in a program designed to help low-income families pay for broadband internet service.

Congress created the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, to provide broadband internet assistance to low-income households.

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Biden Energy Department’s Claim It Replenished Strategic Petroleum Reserve Misleading, Expert Says

Joe Biden

When the Department of Energy announced that it had successfully replenished the nation’s stockpile with the total purchased volume of 40 million barrels, the announcement had some people scratching their heads.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), as the stockpile is called, contained over 630 million barrels of crude oil when President Biden took office in January 2021. Last week, it had less than 376 million barrels. How did the DOE refill the SPR with only 40 million barrels?

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Failed Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Paid $60,000 to Teach University of Michigan Public Policy Class

Lori lightfoot

The University of Michigan is spending $60,000 to have ousted Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot co-teach a course on public policy this fall, according to her contract obtained by The College Fix.

Lightfoot is a Democrat whose onerous actions on COVID-19, her refusal to give exclusive interviews to white journalists, and rampant crime during her tenure, among other issues, prompted massive criticism and led to her losing her re-election bid last year to Mayor Brandon Johnson. She has since become a darling of higher education institutions, teaching at Harvard, University of Chicago, and now Michigan.

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Former Minnesotan Erin Haust Warns: Governor Tim Walz Is ‘Outrageously Radical’ and ‘Dangerously Inadequate’

Tim Walz

Erin Haust, a digital marketing expert and former journalist who recently moved from Minnesota to Tennessee, is warning voters about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the governor was tapped by Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to be her running mate in the 2024 election.

Haust, who lived in Minnesota for 12 years before deciding to move to the Volunteer State, said Walz handled the COVID-19 pandemic by ordering excessive lockdowns and mismanaging funds.

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Commentary: Buttigieg’s Bold Crime Claim Doesn’t Hold Up

Pete Buttigieg

“Crime went down under Biden, and crime went up under Trump,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”

“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden similarly claimed. And fact-checkers, at places like Politifact, rate Biden’s statement as “true.”

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Commentary: Government Policies are Exacerbating Evictions

Eviction Notice

Evictions are soaring, and Americans can’t pay the rent, potentially throwing hundreds of thousands of families out of their homes at a time when homeless shelters are jammed to the rafters with 10 million illegal immigrants.

It’s a useful reminder that the problem with our ruling elite isn’t just President Joe Biden’s dementia. They’ve made a very big bed we’re all going to be lying in.

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Student Test Scores Continue to Plummet Despite Hundreds of Billions in Pandemic Aid for Education

Student taking class online

Student test scores are continuing to fall four years after schools moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study released Tuesday by testing company Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).

The paper found gaps in academic performance between today’s students and their pre-pandemic counterparts are widening, despite the record $190 billion in federal aid distributed to schools since the pandemic began. The findings — which were divulged from an analysis of test results from the 2023-24 school year for approximately 7.7 million students between the third and eighth grades — also come two years after experts had claimed a recovery in education was underway.

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Democrats’ Plan B Whitmer Sued for Forcing Therapists to Help Kids Get Sterilizing Drugs Disavowed by UK

The U.K.-based Economist speculates that Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could save her party from defeat in November if she replaces “doddering” President Biden on the ticket, by nationalizing her Great Lakes State strategy of “relentless targeting of suburban swing voters with simple messages: abortion rights, jobs and infrastructure.”

Voters might ask this scion of a political family, who acted out her motto “get sh*t done” by shutting down in-store gardening sections and in-state travel to second homes to defeat COVID-19, why she’s allegedly forcing counselors to help mentally fragile children “undergo permanent, life-altering medical procedures that many will come to regret.”

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Navy’s Suicide Rate Soars to Record High in First Three Months of 2024

Navy Funeral

The Navy reported a record-high number of suicides in the first three months of 2024 amid previous reports of poor quality of life and high stress for members of the branch, according to new data from the Pentagon.

There have been 24 reported suicides among sailors in the first quarter of 2024, the highest quarterly sum the service has seen since 2018, which was the first year such data was made available, according to the Pentagon. A service wellness survey conducted in February by the Navy found that more than a third of sailors were suffering from “severe or extreme levels of stress” in 2023, up from roughly a quarter who reported so in 2019.

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Four Years Later, CDC Documents on COVID-19’s Origin in China Emerge as Oversight Wanes

Newly released documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal early evidence and analysis four years ago in which U.S. government officials indicated that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China.

These findings in the CDC documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, dating from about six months after the disease’s initial outbreak, are coming to light only now because of the government’s repeated delays in releasing relevant documents through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

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Tennessee Woman Awarded Settlement from Blue Cross Blue Shield After Refusal to Take COVID-19 Vaccine

Vaccine COVID

A Tennessee woman who was fired from her job at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee (BCBST) for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine was awarded nearly $700,000 by a jury.

“The jury found that Plaintiff, TANJA BENTON, proved by a preponderance of the evidence that her refusal to receive the Covid vaccination was based upon a sincerely held religious belief,” said a Judgement Order written by Judge Charles Atchley of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.

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Commentary: The Federal Government Loses More Money than Could Ever Be Accounted For

Accountant working on spreadsheets

Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction.

The payments to Gober were part of $260 million the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent from 2009 through 2019 to reimburse healthcare providers in 15 states and Puerto Rico for services to patients who were dead, according to the inspector general of the HHS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid — programs with combined expenditures of $1.7 trillion.

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Pentagon Doesn’t Know If It Funds Dangerous Biological Research in China, New Audit Reveals

Medical research lab

Despite years of warnings that China operates an illicit biological weapons program, the U.S. military remains unable to determine whether it sends American tax dollars to Beijing for research that could make pathogens more dangerous or deadly, the Pentagon’s chief watchdog declared in a stunning new warning to policymakers.

“The DoD did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential,” the Pentagon inspector general concluded in a report released this month.

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Two Arizona Prosecutors Fight over Gov. Katie Hobbs Investigation amid Conflict of Interest Concerns

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, and Gov. Katie Hobbs (composite image)

by Natalia Mittelstadt   Two Arizona prosecutors are conducting independent investigations into Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) regarding an alleged pay-to-play scheme, with both accusing the other of having a conflict of interest. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell (R) are both investigating Hobbs for alleged criminal conduct, but each are telling the other prosecutor to stand down from their investigation because of potentially improper motivations. Last Friday, Mayes opened a criminal probe into corruption allegations involving Hobbs and donations from a group home business. Mayes notified the state legislature that she had received a criminal referral from a GOP lawmaker involving allegations with Sunshine Residential Homes. “The Criminal Division of the Attorney General’s Office is statutorily authorized to investigate the allegations and offenses outlined in your letter. To that end, the Attorney General’s Office will be opening an investigation,” Mayes wrote. The announcement came after The Arizona Republic reported that the group home business that cares for vulnerable children was approved for a 60% rate hike after it donated about $400,000 to Hobb’s inauguration and the state Democratic Party. Sunshine requested the rate hike to address financial hardships amid the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation, the newspaper…

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TennCare Completes Year-Long Case Review, More Than a Half-Million Members Deemed Ineligible So Far

Doctor

More than 63,000 eligibility checks are still pending but more than 967,000 individuals are renewed and nearly 508,000 are ineligible following the full year review of TennCare cases.

The analysis of more than 1.5 million members comes after the federal COVID-19 pandemic eligibility check pause between March 2020 to March 31, 2023.

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Election Integrity Advocates Score Wins in Majority of Lawsuits Ahead of November

Several election lawsuits filed recently with significant impact on the 2024 presidential election have been decided in favor of election integrity proponents, ensuring laws remain enforced ahead of the November election.

The lawsuits filed focused on candidate eligibility, different changes in law, and alleged violations of election laws. Most of them have resulted in wins for election integrity, while two are ongoing.

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Commentary: A COVID Vaccine Injury Story

Vaccine Shot

Craig Norkus thought there was no reason to question the safety of the COVID vaccines. He’d received two shots already with no ill effects, and he, along with the rest of the public, was continuously assured that the vaccines were safe and effective. So on November 3, 2022, he received his third booster, and his saga of suffering began.

Craig grew up in Rochester, NY, moving to the Twin Cities in 2001. He’s the father of two adult children, an avid Vikings fan, and a dedicated fitness enthusiast. Prior to his vaccine injury, Craig worked out seven days per week and enjoyed golf and hiking.

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