Legislation to allow all businesses to qualify as “essential” and have an equal opportunity to remain open during a future public health emergency has passed the Ohio Senate.
Unanimous Senate passage on November 16 of Amended House Bill 215 – or the Business Fairness Act – seeks to prevent the wholesale closure of businesses such as smaller Ohio retailers considered “non-essential” under Ohio Health Department’s orders at the onslaught of COVID-19 20 months ago.
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Twenty months after the COVID-19 pandemic struck Michigan, downtown Lansing hasn’t recovered fully. Half of the state’s roughly 48,000 employees are still working remotely.
The disappearance of daily consumption habits of more than 22,000 state workers have hurt local businesses, whether that’s grabbing a bagel from The New Daily Bagel, rolls from AnQi Sushi Express or a shake from Soul Nutrition. Some businesses have adjusted accordingly, cutting hours, closing locations, and reducing menus.
The Michigan Department of Technology, Management, and Budget (DTMB) Spokesman Caleb Buhs said about half of state workers are working remotely on a daily basis.
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The head of the Scottsdale Unified School District has lost his gavel after his peers have voted to strip him of his title and asked for his resignation, which he flatly refused.
Jann-Michael Greenburg is under investigation by school district officials and the Scottsdale Police Department for his alleged involvement in keeping and sharing a set of online files containing personal information of parents who opposed the board’s COVID-19 mitigations, including information on some of their children.
Greenburg’s father, Michael Greenburg, was listed as the owner of the files before they were taken from public view, according to the Scottsdale Independent.
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U.S. Representative Austin Scott (R-GA-08) and 22 other members of the House want U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to help reduce India’s tariffs on American pecans.
India currently has a 36 percent tariff on American pecans, far higher than the 10 percent tariff on other American tree nuts, like pistachios and almonds.
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On Monday, the Tennessee Comptroller’s Office announced in a press release that it has launched a new webpage that will allow Tennessee businesses, governmental entities, or schools to seek an exemption from a new law that prohibits Tennessee businesses from imposing vaccine mandates.
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Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said President Joe Biden is “all over” rising gasoline prices but failed to name a single administration policy aimed at lowering energy costs.
“The president is all over this,” Granholm said during a CNN interview Monday. “He really is very concerned about, you know, inflation, obviously, and the price of gasoline because that’s the most obvious manifestation of it. As you know, no president controls the price of gas, oil is sold on a global market.”
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The head of the Oklahoma National Guard won’t require troops to comply with the Pentagon’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, but don’t expect the Georgia National Guard to follow Oklahoma’s example.
Adjutant General of Georgia Major General Thomas Carden told The Georgia Star News on Monday that he intends to follow orders.
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When students are armed with a world class education, they can break down barriers and achieve their deepest dreams. However, in America today, big government and big unions are preventing students from receiving a quality education by forcing American kids to attend the school closest to them, even when it is totally failing. There is no school competition for kids who can’t afford to opt-out of the shoddy school they are forced to attend. This policy and practice especially impacts poor and minority children. But in our home state of California, we’ve had enough of failing government monopolies. We are launching a ballot initiative that will deliver educational freedom to every child in the state, regardless of where they live or how much income their parents earn.
We have all seen government schools that transition from safe havens for learning and hope into depressing institutions that fall short of educating tomorrow’s leaders. Parents are mad, taxpayers are frustrated, and our teachers are not supported by their union bosses. Nowhere is that reality truer than in states where big unions—like the California Teachers Association—control political decision makers with massive campaign war chests seized from their members’ obligatory dues. That’s why Fix California has launched a project to put a ballot initiative in front of voters in 2022—to emancipate students from the government monopoly on education.
Currently, in California, residents are taxed exorbitantly at every turn, with the ruling party’s promise that those dollars will ostensibly be spent on improving the state. That’s a lie on many fronts, but it’s especially untrue in education where failing government schools continue to be rewarded by more tax dollars and virtually no accountability. Tax dollars are siphoned off in the form of required union dues and are funneled straight into the coffers of corrupt unions financing campaigns of politicians who ensure the gravy train keeps flowing. It is a crooked cycle that has destroyed government education across the country.
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The head of the Oklahoma National Guard won’t require his troops to comply with the Pentagon’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, but Tennessee National Guard (TNG) troops should not expect their superiors to follow the Oklahoma’s commander’s lead.
TNG spokesman Darrin Haas said Monday that his commanders will enforce Biden’s vaccine mandate.
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On Sunday, Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) announced that masks will remain necessary in the school system until further notice despite Governor Bill Lee signing legislation into law that prohibits schools from implementing mask mandates.
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Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon on Friday signed legislation prohibiting public entities from enforcing the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
House Bill 1002, which was the only piece of legislation passed during the Wyoming Legislature’s special session, also provides $4 million in funding for any legal challenges against federal vaccine mandates.
“No public entity shall enforce any mandate or standard of the federal government, whether emergency, temporary or permanent, that requires an employer to ensure or mandate that an employee shall receive a COVID‑19 vaccination,” the bill reads.
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The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday to keep its stay of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) emergency rule that would require employers of more than 100 employees to mandate COVID-19 vaccines in place, determining that the private businesses challenging the rule were “very likely to win” their case.
The case is BST Holdings v. OSHA, No. 21-60845. BST Holdings, along with a host of other companies and several states, including Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi and Utah, sued President Joe Biden’s OSHA to halt the vaccine mandate.
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The Biden administration has finally published its anticipated ultimatum threatening companies like mine with severe fines and penalties for not firing any employee who declines to be vaccinated against or submit to invasive weekly testing for COVID-19. The new rule promulgated by the U.S. Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under the guise of workplace safety may well bankrupt the business my father founded. So, as the CEO of the Phillips Manufacturing & Tower Company, I am joining with The Buckeye Institute to challenge OSHA’s vaccine mandate in court. Here’s why.
Phillips is a 54-year-old company based in Shelby, Ohio, that manufactures specialty welded steel tubing for automotive, appliance, and construction industries. OSHA’s emergency rule applies to companies with 100 or more employees — at our Shelby Welded Tube facility, we employ 104 people. As a family-owned business I take the health of my workers seriously — they are my neighbors and my friends. When I heard of the mandate, we conducted a survey of our workers to see what the impacts would be. It revealed that 28 Phillips employees are fully vaccinated, while antibody testing conducted at company expense found that another 16 employees have tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies and likely possess natural immunity. At least 47 employees have indicated that they have not and will not be vaccinated. Seventeen of those 47 unvaccinated workers said that they would quit or be fired before complying with the vaccine or testing mandate. Those are 17 skilled workers that Phillips cannot afford to lose.
Perhaps the Biden administration remains unaware of the labor shortage currently plaguing the U.S. labor market generally and industrial manufacturing especially. Like many companies, Phillips is already understaffed, with seven job openings we have been unable to fill. Employees already work overtime to keep pace with customer demand, working 10-hour shifts, six days a week on average. Firing 17 veteran members of the Phillips team certainly won’t help.
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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has called for a “new way of doing the vaccines” against viruses like COVID-19 given that they do not “block” transmission.
Gates said the “economic damage” and death toll from COVID-19 was “completely horrific.”
Gates expects the world’s experience with COVID-19 to lead to larger research and development budgets to better prepare for a future pandemic.
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Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the Biden administration over three different vaccine mandates targeting private employees, federal employees and healthcare workers serving Medicare and Medicaid patients.
But lawsuits filed by 27 states over the private sector mandate is setting the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in because they were filed directly in five federal courts of appeals.
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In response to a law firm’s query, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was unable to provide a single instance in which an unvaccinated person who’d previously had COVID-19 became reinfected with and transmitted the virus to someone else. The CDC said it does not collect such data, even though the medical freedom of millions of Americans hang in the balance.
A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September, many of them pushed out of the workforce by the unnecessary vaccine mandates.
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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee on Friday signed the COVID omnibus bill into law. This, according to a press release that Lee’s office published Friday evening.
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Few would argue the United States, or any country for that matter, was prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, even though, starting in 2003, the U.S. devoted $5.6 billion to fund Project Bioshield, running through 2013, and another $2.8 billion of funding through 2018. Project Bioshield was designed to prepare the United States against a bio attack, including provisions for the stockpiling and distribution of vaccines.
Though Covid-19 was a new virus, congressional testimony from 2003 paints a concerning picture about what we knew – and when – about the family of viruses from which it originated.
“I am particularly interested in learning how Project BioShield would assist in addressing the current public health emergency created by the epidemic known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS],” said Tom Davis, chairman of the Committee on Government Reform. “More than 2,000 suspected cases of this mysterious disease have been reported in 17 nations, including the United States, with 78 fatalities. So far, there is no effective treatment or vaccine to combat this deadly syndrome.”
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the national public health agency of the United States, so it made sense that during a once-in-a-century pandemic the agency would be given a leading role. With that leadership, however, came limelight. And in so many ways during the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC, under the spotlight, undeniably flopped.
In his recently published book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb critiqued numerous aspects of the worldwide response to COVID-19. Many CDC actions garnered forceful rebukes. While Gottlieb recognizes that a lot of talented, smart, and dedicated individuals work within the CDC, he says it’s hard to deny that the respected governmental agency failed in a lot of vital respects. Here are six of them:
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“History will figure that out on its own.” That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab—and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.
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Homeschooling is here to stay and the time has come for policymakers to acknowledge that fact. After years of increasing at a rate of about 3 percent a year, the number of parents choosing to homeschool their children has spiked, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the portion of children being homeschooled doubled from 5.4 percent during the 2019-20 school year to 11 percent in 2020-21. Among Black families, homeschooling jumped nearly five-fold during that time, from 3.3 percent to 16.1 percent.
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Federal officials have arraigned Stonecrest Mayor Jason Lary, on federal charges of wire fraud, conspiracy, and federal program theft related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This, according to a press release that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia published Wednesday.
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Hennepin County Judge Regina Chu ruled Tuesday that cameras will be allowed in the courtroom in the upcoming trial of former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter.
On Saturday, a mob of left-wing agitators protested outside of what they thought was this same judge’s home, angered by her August decision to prohibit news outlets from recording or livestreaming the court proceedings. Chu no longer lives in the condominium where protesters gathered, according to the Star Tribune.
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Federal workers with naturally acquired immunity to COVID-19 filed a class-action lawsuit Monday against the federal government over the Biden administration’s mandate that all federal workers be vaccinated against it as a condition of employment. The mandate doesn’t allow for exemptions for religious or other reasons, including having natural immunity.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil liberties group, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation on behalf of 11 individuals.
Those named in the lawsuit include Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief COVID Response Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and over 20 officials including cabinet heads, as well as several task forces and several federal agencies. They include the U.S. surgeon general, director of CDC and OPM, the secretaries of the departments of Veteran’s Affairs, FEMA, FPS, OMB, Secret Service, USGA, among others.
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles in studio to discuss hard data on COVID death rates and whether or not Conservatives have had enough.
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The Ohio Supreme Court has agreed to take up the appeal of Governor Michael DeWine’s decision to cut off the $300 bonus unemployment checks funded by the federal government.
The court announced it will take up the case from the 10 District Court of Appeals but has yet to schedule a hearing date or indicate if the appeal warrants oral arguments.
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Michigan businesses are scrambling to handle President Joe Biden’s Jan. 4 national vaccine mandate for private businesses exceeding 100 workers.
Michigan Occupational Safety Health Administration (MIOSHA) Director Bart Pickelman told The Center Square in an email that starting Nov. 5, federal OSHA issued an emergency temporary standard (ETS) to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission in the workplace. An ETS summary is here.
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Breakthrough COVID-19 cases have surpassed 64,000 in Minnesota as more than 483 fully-vaccinated Minnesotans have died from the virus, the Department of Health reported Monday.
As of Nov. 1, there were 372 breakthrough deaths. Now, as of Nov. 8, there are 483. This means that 111 of the 168 reported deaths in the last week have been in the vaccinated, according to Healthy Skeptic.
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In line with Department of Defense policy, staff at the Tennessee National Guard (TNG) will punish members who do not vaccinate themselves against COVID-19.
TNSG personnel will discharge any members who decline to vaccinate themselves, said TNG spokesman Darrin Haas.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published an “early release” study last week that uses a highly curated population to purportedly show that mRNA-vaccinated people have a much lower rate of reinfection by COVID-19 than naturally immune people, contradicting a much larger Israeli study this summer.
The CDC study concludes: “All eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.”
The study analyzed “COVID-19–like illness hospitalizations among adults” across nine states from January through Sept. 2. Because public health authorities portrayed vaccination as the best way to avoid hospitalization, it’s less likely that vaccinated people would seek hospitalization, thus hiding their breakthrough infections relative to the naturally immune.
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In a PolitiFact article titled “Why the COVID-19 Survival Rate Is Not Over 99%,” staff writer Jason Asenso argues that about 1.7% of U.S. residents who contract COVID-19 die from it. However, he uses a naive approach to calculate this figure, and legitimate methods show that the average COVID-19 survival rate is firmly over 99%.
Medical journals have documented the deadly harms of exaggerating the fatality rate of COVID-19. Nevertheless, Facebook is amplifying PolitiFact’s false claim by using it to censor genuine facts about this issue.
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The Virginia Employment Commission (VEC) is starting to recover from over a year of unemployment insurance (UI) backlogs and call wait times brought on by unprecedented demand during COVID-19, according to a final report from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC.) But the VEC crisis highlighted long-term systemic problems in the agency, and the agency still has a long way to go.
“As you’ll hear, some backlogs have been reduced, and call center performance has been improved somewhat, but there are increasing backlogs in other areas. There remain substantial challenges for the agency in the coming weeks, months, and even years,” JLARC Director Hal Greer told legislators on Monday.
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During the beginning of COVID-19, hospital inpatient volume and emergency department visits decreased, in part due to people postponing treatment. But the same data showed an increase in the number of patients getting treatment for alcohol, drug use, and related mental disorders, the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association (VHHA) reported in April. In a Friday press conference, VHHA Vice President of Data and Analytics David Vaamonde reported that increased treatment for those kinds of disorders continued into the first two quarters of 2021 — one of only two Major Diagnostic Categories (MDCs) that saw growth since the beginning of the pandemic.
“We’re looking at MDCs where volumes actually increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We have alcohol and drug use, and drug induced organic mental health disorders, obviously a very concerning trend there, and then diseases and disorders of the respiratory system and infectious and parasitic diseases,” Vaamonde said, adding that the respiratory, infectious, and parasitic categories line up with what a COVID-19 patient would have.
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Fowlerville Community Schools will not require students exposed to a positive case of COVID-19 to quarantine, the district announced on Tuesday.
The new policy will allow students in all grades, who remain asymptomatic, to continue their in-person education, despite a possible exposure.
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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced he will be extending the COVID-19 State of Emergency for two weeks, according to a tweet he sent out Friday afternoon.
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Until recently, I was a California teacher working in two charter schools, one as a full-time classroom teacher of Government/Economics and sometimes U.S. History, and the other as a part-time independent study teacher who assists families with a program primarily based around homeschooling. I have taught for about five years and love teaching.
Last week, I was fired from one school and put on unpaid administrative leave at the other because of my refusal either to take and demonstrate proof of the COVID-19 vaccine or test weekly. I even filed a religious exemption stating the following that was rejected:
“As a committed follower of Christ, I religiously and philosophically cannot submit to either a government vaccine mandate or weekly testing.
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COVID-19 is taking a back seat when it comes to the economy, education and more, recent polls show.
In a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, only about 12% of American adults surveyed said they would list public health issues, which include COVID-19, as a top priority, below economic issues like the job market and inflation. The poll also showed 73% of respondents saying political leaders should focus on growing jobs and the economy and two-thirds of voters, including a majority of both Republicans and Democrats, agreeing that “inflation is a very big concern for me.”
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The State of Georgia’s net tax collections in October approached $2.48 billion, for an increase of $460.7 million, or 22.9 percent, compared to October 2020, when net tax collections totaled roughly $2.02 billion. This, according to an emailed press release that Governor Brian Kemp’s office emailed Friday.
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Arizona’s businesses are soon to get a shot in the arm from COVID-19 vaccinated international visitors as the U.S. reopens its borders to leisure travel.
The Biden administration will reopen the country’s borders Monday for nonessential travel. The opening marks 18 months of borders closed to nonessential travel because of COVID-19 restrictions.
The decision was announced in October. It does not apply to illegal border crossings.
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Education Minnesota, the state’s far-left teachers union, wants lawmakers in St. Paul to “consider a state holiday for vaccinating students.”
Denise Specht, president of the union, thinks all eligible children should be vaccinated unless they have a “rare and legitimate medical reason” for not getting the shot.
“State and local leaders must be bold in their efforts to make this vaccine available to every student, no matter where they live or how much money they have,” she said.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who was the first person in the country to sue the Biden administration over its COVID-19 vaccine mandates, is now co-leading another lawsuit with 11 other attorneys general over another aspect of the mandates. This new lawsuit challenges the mandate for private businesses with over 100 employees.
His first lawsuit, filed on September 14, primarily challenged the mandate’s applicability to federal employees and contractors. Brnovich and 23 other attorneys general next warned the Biden administration in a letter on September 16 that a new lawsuit was coming if the mandate wasn’t reversed. On October 22, Brnovich filed a request for an emergency temporary restraining order to stop the mandate from going into effect.
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Tennessee Attorney General Herb Slatery and six other state attorneys general have filed a petition before a federal court challenging the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private sector employees. This, according to a press release that members of Slatery’s staff emailed Friday.
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I stand with all my fellow Americans—both vaccinated and unvaccinated. And because I do, I recently refused to disclose my vaccination status. And you should, too.
I was invited to speak at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Law about the many public and private mandates enacted, supposedly, to address COVID-19—all of which I oppose. I view vaccine mandates, for example, as the most totalitarian commands we have seen in this country since the days of eugenics-based forced sterilization—leading science, at the time.
Ironically, one week before my scheduled speech, I was told that school bureaucrats mandated off-campus visitors like me confirm they are vaccinated. Many will say that sharing this private health information is a minor intrusion with little downside. I think that’s a mistake.
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U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation that would prohibit the federal government and any entity at the federal, state and local level that receives federal funding, including school districts, from requiring COVID-19 vaccines for minors.
“Parents should have the right to decide what is best for their children in consultation with their family doctor,” he said. “My view on the COVID-19 vaccine has remained clear: no mandates of any kind.
“President [Joe] Biden and his administration have repeatedly ignored medical privacy rights and personal liberty by pushing unlawful and burdensome vaccine mandates on American businesses, and now they are preparing to push a mandate on kids by pressuring parents – all without taking into account relative risk or the benefits of natural immunity.”
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Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and state Attorney General Chris Carr on Friday announced that they filed a lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s employer vaccine mandate. The Federal Register published The Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) setting forth the mandate on Friday, the press release said.
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BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BSBCT) had 41 fewer employees as of Friday because those now-former employees said no to the COVID-19 vaccine. BSBCT spokeswoman Dalya Qualls told The Tennessee Star in an email Friday that 19 staff members left the company last month. She also said another 22 staff members left Thursday. Qualls did not specify how many BSBCT employees left voluntarily versus how many got fired.
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Although the COVID-19 vaccine has been widely available since spring, so-called “breakthrough” cases, where someone contracts the coronavirus after being vaccinated, are spiking in parts of the country including Arizona. Nearly 18 percent of new COVID-19 infections in September were among the vaccinated. The majority of them received the Pfizer vaccine, although substantial numbers of breakthrough cases happened after receiving the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, in mid-April, there were 495 breakthrough cases in Arizona. Now, there are 49,962. Of those, 376 people have died, although their cause of death wasn’t specified.
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Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery has announced that he and the attorneys general in Ohio and Kentucky have filed suit against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors. This, according to a press release that members of Slatery’s staff emailed Thursday.
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Private firms’ payrolls increased by 571,000 in October, far exceeding experts’ expectations as hiring throughout the country heats up, according to a major employment report.
The 571,000 jobs added is a slight increase from the 523,000 jobs added in September, the ADP National Employment Report showed. The Dow Jones estimate predicted companies would add 395,000 jobs in October, CNBC reported.
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President Joe Biden’s approval rating has fallen to 42%, according to a new NBC News poll; his disapproval rating hit 54%, up 6 points from August.
The majority polled, 71%, including nearly half of registered Democrats, say the country is headed in the wrong direction. Republicans and Independents say the country is headed in the wrong direction, 93% and 70%, respectively, with 48% of Democrats saying the same.
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