The National Institutes of Health appears to be struggling to hide its dirty laundry on COVID-19 origins against a rash of leaks, congressional probes, and Freedom of Information Act requests, even when officials are determined to thwart sunlight.
The ongoing exposure of their communications and actions isn’t the only thing likely worrying federal scientists.
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Finances at the vaccine manufacturer Moderna began to fall almost as quickly as they had risen, as most Americans resisted getting yet another COVID booster shot. The pharmaceutical company, whose pioneering mRNA vaccine had turned it from small startup to biotech giant worth more than $100 billion in just a few years, reported a third-quarter loss last year of $3.6 billion, as most Americans refused to get another COVID booster shot.
In a September call aimed at shoring up investors, Moderna’s then-chief commercial officer, Arpa Garay, attributed some of the hesitancy pummeling Moderna’s numbers to uninformed vaccine skeptics. “Despite some misinformation,” Garay said, COVID-19 still drove significant hospitalizations. “It really is a vaccine that’s relevant across all age groups,” she insisted.
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When the pandemic hit, state and federal governments upped financial aid to the public with more welfare benefits, stimulus checks and loans.
That aid is still high in some cases, with no signs of changing.
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Once she saw the data, pediatrician Dr. Renata Moon knew she had to speak out. Over her more than 20 years of practicing medicine, including more than 17 years of treating high-risk patients, Dr. Moon had never been anti-vaccine—until she saw what was happening with the COVID-19 vaccines.
In Dr. Moon’s words: “As the data rolled out on the vaccine and COVID-19, it became clear that children had basically a zero risk of death from infection by COVID [whereas] they have potential serious risk from taking the COVID-19 shots.”
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President Joe Biden’s administration is getting some big-name allies as it defends against a landmark free speech infringement lawsuit. Their argument: protecting Americans from indirect censorship by government officials undermines the First Amendment, national security, and public health.
Advocacy groups for journalists, academics, doctors, technologists, and big business, and a powerful senator, made various forms of these arguments in friend-of-the-court briefs to the Supreme Court in the days before and after Christmas.
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More and more Army soldiers are reenlisting after being discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, according to information shared exclusively with The Daily Signal.
The increase comes after Congress repealed the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate and conservative lawmakers applied pressure to Defense Department leaders to be more welcoming of 8,400 service members who were “fired” for their refusal to get the COVID-19 shot.
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The Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday announced roughly $1 billion in penalty relief to those owing back taxes from 2020 and 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Life is hard if you do not learn from your mistakes. With Covid, political leaders and public health authorities engaged in a series of missteps, miscalculations, and manias that amounted to an extreme overreaction to the disease.
First, statistical models overstated the risk of the disease by an order of magnitude. Then, even after these miscalculations became apparent, other extreme measures like lockdowns, mandatory masking, coercive vaccine mandates, and a million other indignities ensued. In the end, almost everyone got Covid, almost everyone survived, and, while the economic countermeasures increased our national debt by 30%, the economy soon recovered too.
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Three years after federal regulators granted emergency use authorization to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for older teens and adults, mainstream scientific research is confirming suppressed warnings from two years ago that the novel technology has a problem with “translation fidelity.”
Translation: it tends to make a bunch of wacky “off-target” proteins whose effects and severity are unknown.
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Anyone who lived through 2020 observed that some messages received treatment online that stood in stark contrast to other messages. Conservative voices and messages were censored and banned, while progressive voices and messages flowed freely. If a person spoke against COVID-19 lockdowns—and later vaccines—there was a good chance that a social media platform would take down the post. If one were to suggest that suspicious activities occurred surrounding the 2020 election, the label “misinformation” might appear.
The primary vehicle to censor internet speech is to label disfavored messages as dis-, mis-, or mal-information. While the category of malinformation is seemingly the most offensive – true information that government censors believe lacks sufficient “context” – the other categories can be just as malignant. Mis- and disinformation require someone to determine what is true and what is not.
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A former Army medical officer has filed a criminal complaint against his commanding officer, alleging that the major general unlawfully retaliated against him after he made protected whistleblower disclosures about the COVID-19 shots.
After the COVID-19 vaccine mandate was imposed on the military, First Lieutenant Mark Charles Bashaw sent communications up the chain of command alleging violations of military regulations and federal law, and warned of the health risks associated with the shots, the Epoch Times reported.
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With Christmas fast-approaching, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa put out a “naughty list” of government agencies that have high no-show rates of employees who have not returned to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic ended.
According to Ernst’s list, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Social Security Administration top the list with just 7 percent office occupancy rates.
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In episode 46 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed Infowars host Alex Jones, described by Carlson as “the most dangerous man – the most censored man in the English language.”
Kicking off the 91-minute interview, Carlson said Jones had been “deplatformed, de-personed, and de-banked” for the crime of “ having opinions that deeply rattled the people who run America.”
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has inspected fewer pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, with foreign facilities, including those from China, seeing the largest decreases, according to a study released in December.
In 2022, the total number of inspections of drug manufacturing establishments by the FDA decreased by 79% for foreign and 35% for domestic facilities compared to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study by Emily Cuddy, Yun Peng Lu and David B. Ridley using data acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests. Despite the drop in inspections, there was no corresponding decrease in imports or manufacturing, while resources allocated by the FDA toward inspections surged per inspection.
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The best-case scenario for one of the most common COVID-19 interventions may be that it has no measurable effect on infection, recent studies suggest.
A systematic review of studies of mask mandates for children, published Saturday in the British Medical Journal’s Archives of Disease in Childhood, found “no association” with infection or transmission in 16 of the 22 observational studies and “critical” or “serious” risk of bias in the six countervailing studies. It got the attention of Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Thursday that he is suing Pfizer for “unlawfully misrepresenting” Covid-19 vaccine efficacy and conspiring to censor public discourse.
“Pfizer engaged in false, deceptive, and misleading acts and practices by making unsupported claims regarding the company’s COVID-19 vaccine in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act,” Paxton said in a press release.
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Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci is set to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in early January, the subcommittee announced Thursday.
Fauci will take part in a two-day interview on Jan. 8 and Jan. 9, making his first appearance before the 118th Congress, according to the subcommittee. Fauci also agreed to testify in a public hearing, though the date of that hearing has yet to be announced.
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Despite the passage of state and federal laws that were supposed to reduce fatal drug overdoses, the annual U.S. drug overdose death rate has quintupled over recent decades:
Over the most current year of available data, more than 110,000 people in the U.S. died of drug overdoses, a rate of 33 per 100,000 population.
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The U.S. Air Force sent out a letter telling an airman booted from the service over the now-rescinded COVID-19 vaccine mandate of an opportunity to rejoin the service, mirroring similar letters sent to former Army service members, according to a copy of one Air Force letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
A former Air Force service member who was separated for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine received the letter Sunday addressed with the recipient’s name, according to a source familiar with the matter. The letter tells former airmen they can request to have their service records amended to show that they received honorable discharges and seek reentry into the service amidst the service’s failure to meet recruiting goals.
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The parental rights group Moms for Liberty’s revenue has grown by more than 500% in its second year, according to the Form 990 it filed with the IRS.
According to the Form 990, exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal, Moms for Liberty brought in $2.14 million in total revenue in 2022, while it brought in $370,029 in total revenue the year before. A significant majority of that money (92.3%) came from donations—contributions and grants. Expenses for 2021 totaled a mere $163,647, while in 2022 they rose to $1.7 million.
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School districts across the country spent millions in federal relief funds on educational software intended to mitigate pandemic learning loss, but in many cases, much of the technology wasn’t used, according to The Associated Press.
Schools received billions in COVID-19 relief funds from Congress, and tech companies engaged in aggressive marketing to get districts to purchase their products. School districts used these federal funds to enter multi-million dollar contracts for software licenses that often went unused by students, the AP reported. Moreover, some products were found to not be particularly effective.
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In 2017, a report from an official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) raised red flags about the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), according to internal records revealed this week by U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI).
“It is clear to me by talking to the technician that certainly there is a need for training support,” Dr. Ping Chen, an NIAID official, wrote in a report about the controversial laboratory suspected of unleashing COVID-19 on the world.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is over, but vaccine mandates imposed by colleges and universities are not. Now a Virginia congressman has introduced a bill to withhold federal funds from institutions of higher education that require vaccinations against the disease.
President Joe Biden declared the pandemic over in ending the public health emergency May 11. Despite this, nearly 100 colleges and universities currently require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 for the 2023-2024 school year.
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As some entities begin to bring back COVID-19 mask mandates, and while the federal government is pushing a new version of the COVID-19 vaccine, Tennessee’s governor said there will be no further mandates in the Volunteer State.
“We learned in the last one the government does not need to tell people how to live their lives with regard to their personal health,” Gov. Bill Lee (R) said Wednesday. “Those are decisions they need to make, and that’s the way it will be going forward.”
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Federal health officials face a growing hurdle in their quest to persuade Americans of all ages and risk profiles to get updated COVID-19 boosters: strong proponents of vaccination.
From New England to the Bay Area, researchers voiced concerns to mainstream science and health publications in recent days that the one-size-fits-all model may be backfiring.
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Georgia U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) recently introduced the Freedom to Breathe Act which, if enacted, would prohibit the federal government from reimposing mask mandates on American travelers and students.
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Schools and universities around the U.S. are bringing back mask mandates and shutdowns as COVID-19 numbers rise, according to public records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Runge Independent School District (ISD) in Texas, Magoffin County (MC) Schools in Kentucky, Lee County School District in Kentucky and Rosemary Hills Elementary School in Maryland are all reimplementing some form of COVID-19 measures, according to public records reviewed by the DCNF. Some universities are reimplementing mask mandates, such as Dillard University in Louisiana and Morris Brown College (MBC) in Georgia, though MBC backtracked on its mandate.
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As public and private institutions resume or consider mask mandates in the wake of a small uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants, an international research collaborative funded by the National Institutes of Health is facing new scrutiny for how it came to publicly downplay its 17 years of research finding that masks make “little to no difference.”
U.K-based nonprofit Cochrane, often described as the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine, heavily redacted its internal discussions on how to respond to questions about alleged conflicts of interest that may have shaped its March statement deeming the systematic review’s results “inconclusive” without changing its content.
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Several hospital systems in the United States are slowly bringing back mask mandates as fears over COVID-19 reemerge, according to public websites and reports reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
United Health Services in New York, Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center in California, Auburn Community Hospital in New York, UMass Memorial Health in Boston, Massachusetts and University Hospital in Syracuse, New York, have all reinstated mask mandates in the past several weeks, with some requiring staff only to wear masks and others requiring everyone to wear masks, according to public websites and reports reviewed by the DCNF. Moreover, several doctors are calling for renewed masked mandates, despite evidence suggesting that mandates may not be as effective as their proponents claim.
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Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is cleaning up old executive orders from the COVID-19 pandemic under former Gov. Doug Ducey.
The governor announced Tuesday afternoon that she’d rescinded 14 orders that were largely moot because of subsequent legislation or measures her administration had taken.
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by Greg Piper Governments and private entities are using a small rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants to juice interest in bivalent boosters that only 1 in 6 Americans have taken and to urge a return to routine masking, if not outright mandating new jabs and face coverings. What they aren’t providing is robust evidence for the effectiveness of the interventions against infection by a virus that has already provided natural immunity to an estimated 19 in 20 Americans as of November 2022, according to Harvard research published in this month’s journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. “If a tiny bump in the rate of new weekly Covid hospital admissions—that still is among the lowest rates over the last three years—relates to a surge, then what is an actual large rise called?” science journalist David Zweig wrote in an essay Thursday questioning explanations by public-health pundits for the increase. “The use of this hyperbolic language by so many media outlets that over-dramatizes risk skirts very close to misinformation,” said Zweig, known for his reporting on the Twitter Files and scrutiny of the evidence behind school mask mandates and the six-foot rule. Even President Biden acknowledged current COVID vaccines, which include original and Omicron variant strains, are not performing as hoped.…
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking a new COVID-19 strain, BA.2.86, a highly mutated variant that was discovered in Michigan last week as the first case of its kind in the country. The variant has been spotted in the United States, Denmark, Israel and the U.K. This variant is described as being a “variant under monitoring” by the World Health Organization (WHO).
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The U.S. federal program formerly known as food stamps had peak spending levels in 2023 that were more than double pre-pandemic times.
Now, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is set to be reauthorized as it reaches the end of its five-year budgeting cycle.
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Over 40% of the colleges that have closed or consolidated since the start of the pandemic are Christian colleges, according to a report
Christian college closures noted in Higher Ed Dive’s public and private nonprofit college tracker include Cabrini University in Pennsylvania and Alliance University (AU) in New York, which will close Aug. 31.
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Wisconsin is making a major change in how it tracks the coronavirus.
The Department of Health Services recently announced it is ending its daily tracking of COVID-19 cases and deaths.
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Nashville mayoral candidate Freddie O’Connell has tested positive for COVID-19 along with at least 8 other members of the Metro Council, according to reports.
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Three and a half years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, American medical journals are still calling out what they consider commonly shared misinformation on vaccines, masks, transmission and viral origins, sometimes promoted by health professionals.
Yet voluminous research and real-world experiences over that span suggest the journals themselves are promoting outdated, unsupported or exaggerated COVID claims, if not outright misinformation.
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A report at the German-owned Politico Monday stated Democrats are now claiming Republicans have failed to provide evidence that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), led by Randi Weingarten, exerted extraordinary influence over government school reopening policy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Democratic staff said in a memo obtained by Politico,” the news outlet stated, that “[d]espite a lengthy investigation, Republicans still can’t prove one of the nation’s largest teachers unions had undue influence over the Biden administration’s school reopening guidance.”
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Louisiana federal Judge Terry A. Doughty shocked Americans with his July 4th restraining order against Biden’s digital team which was supposed to be fighting “disinformation” but was in reality just banning views online it didn’t like.
Doughty’s opinion is a jaw dropping expose of how White House staff bullied Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to remove content about election fraud, COVID concerns and other matters of public interest in blatant violation of the First Amendment. Governmental actors cannot demand that others do what they cannot under the Constitution, just as you can’t have proxies break the law for you. Yet that’s exactly what Biden officials did and that’s exactly what Judge Doughty stopped.
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Eighty-three House Republicans voted against a measure that would have required commercial airlines receiving federal money to reinstate pilots who were fired for not complying with a federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate since ruled illegal.
Among them were eight Republicans who opposed the measure from Texas, a state that has consistently fought federal mandates. A federal judge in Texas was the first to rule the Biden administration’s federal vaccine mandate was illegal, blocking it in January 2022. The case went to the Supreme Court, which also ruled against the mandate.
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A proposed amendment to the Wisconsin constitution that would clarify that state and local officials “may not order the closure of or forbid gatherings in places of worship,” in response to a state of emergency declared at any level of government during a public health emergency, will go before a state Senate committee Tuesday.
State Republican lawmakers introduced the Senate Joint Resolution 54 in June in response to the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown order that restricted worship gatherings, even though the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down that order.
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The Middle District of Florida United States Attorney’s Office has announced the results of an investigation into fraud related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March 2020, the Middle District U.S. Attorney’s Office, along with federal, state, and local law enforcement, combined resources to form the Middle District of Florida COVID-19 Fraud Task Force to investigate and prosecute cases of fraud that happened during the pandemic.
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U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08) is criticizing a long-awaited report on the origins of COVID-19, saying it failed to answer significant questions surrounding researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology who became sick with an unspecified illness in November 2019.
The 10-page report, finally declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), underscores the fact that the intelligence community remains divided on the origins of a virus that is believed to have killed more than 1.13 million people in the United States, and nearly 7 million worldwide.
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Who is authorized to tax the income of a commuter who doesn’t commute? This question—born of the pandemic and currently pending before the Supreme Court of Ohio—could be coming to a tax bill near you, and soon.
Following the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020, government orders forced millions of employees to work from home instead of at their usual offices. These orders accelerated a trend which had already begun toward remote and hybrid work and—three years later—is all but entrenched.
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Connecticut diners will be able to get drinks to go permanently, with the state becoming the latest to make the COVID-19 pandemic-related policy law.
A measure signed into law by Gov. Ned Lamont on Tuesday codifies emergency regulations several years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic allowing restaurants to sell beer, wine and cocktails with takeout and delivery orders.
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New Jersey Representative Chris Smith (R) announced Monday he will chair a congressional hearing on the Biden administration’s push to enter into an international pandemic treaty that could cede U.S. sovereignty to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Under absolutely no circumstances should the Biden Administration surrender American sovereignty to the World Health Organization and allow the voice of the American people and consent of the governed to be subjugated to dictates of an agenda-driven global administrative bureaucracy,” said Smith, chair of the House Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations Subcommittee.
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Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano’s plans to soon announce whether he’ll run for U.S. Senate next year have Pennsylvania’s movement conservatives brimming with feelings — not all of them positive.
The Republican who represents Gettysburg, Chambersburg and surrounding communities suffered an overwhelming defeat last year when he ran for governor against Democrat Josh Shapiro. After Mastriano indicated he would publicly decide on a bid against Democratic Senator Bob Casey in just days, state Representative Russ Diamond (R-Jonestown) wrote a tweetstorm Monday urging fellow Republicans to entreat Mastriano not to run.
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Many residents of Bucks County, Pennsylvania remember Andy Warren as one of their Republican commissioners in the 1980s and 90s. Now he’s asking them to put him back on the job by nominating him for the GOP slate on Tuesday and electing him in November.
Warren, of Middletown Township, is running for one of two seats on the county Board of Commissioners while the Bucks County Republican Committee is backing incumbent Gene DiGirolamo and County Controller Pamela Van Blunk. Two Republicans will get nominated to face Democratic incumbents Diane Ellis-Marseglia and Robert Harvie in the fall, with seats going to the top three vote getters.
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On Monday, the Biden White House announced that it will finally put an end to national COVID-19 vaccine mandates for federal employees and federal contractors.
As reported by Fox News, May 11th is also the date that the Chinese coronavirus public health emergency will expire, and the Biden Administration has no plans to renew it. The mandate for federal employees and contractors, as well as international air travelers, is the last national vaccine mandate that remained in place after legal challenges brought down similar mandates for private businesses.
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The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing has received $406,250 in federal funds to study how to ensure equal health outcomes among ethnic groups using data from the outbreak of COVID-19.
The project, “Achieving Health Equity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned From Nurses and High Performing Hospitals,” will rely on surveys of over 22,000 nurses to develop “innovative models of care delivery…that are associated with equitable outcomes,” according to an abstract.
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