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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A jury awarded a record $12.6 million to woman fired from Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan for not getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
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A year after promoting passports for the COVID-19 vaccines he helped fund as a way to reopen the global economy, philanthropist Bill Gates complained about their lackluster performance against infection and transmission starting with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. He even called Omicron “a type of vaccine” whose natural immunity could protect unvaccinated groups.
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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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One of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.”
These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos.
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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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Tennessee State Senator Mark Pody (R-Lebanon) said he is working on drafting legislation to file during the next legislative session of the Tennessee General Assembly that would unbound the State of Tennessee from any policies created or pushed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
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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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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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As inflation persists, Pennsylvania voters are rejecting increased government spending, according to new polling data released by the Commonwealth Foundation.
Inflation and the rising cost of living remain Pennsylvanians’ chief concerns. With more than two-thirds of voters saying that high prices are eating away at their standard of living, it’s no wonder that a plurality reports their family is worse off than two years ago.
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When President Joe Biden signed a package of bills over the weekend to avoid a government shutdown, he also made law Sen. J.D. Vance’s legislation to stop federal mask mandates from the Department of Transportation.
The law stops the Transportation Department from using federal funds to enforce mask mandates on passenger airlines, commuter rail, rapid transit buses and any other transportation program funded through fiscal year 2024.
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If a “pandemic treaty” fails to account for the dismal international response to COVID-19 and isn’t focused on preventing future pandemics, is it really a “pandemic treaty”? Yet that’s the current state of the draft “pandemic treaty” being negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The failures of the international health system’s response to COVID are well-established. The People’s Republic of China failed to inform the international community of the outbreak in a timely manner as required by the International Health Regulations – a provision established because of Beijing’s cover-up of the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). China mischaracterized COVID-19 saying that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission—a deadly lie that the WHO parroted unquestioningly.
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Ohio plans to spend $20 million in taxpayer funds over the next 10 years to study the causes of depression, suicide and drug overdoses.
The research initiative, conducted with Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine, along with several stat universities, is expected to study the role of biological, psychological, and social factors that underlie what officials call an epidemic.
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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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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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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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Nearly 70% of students attended schools that experienced chronic absenteeism during the 2021-2022 academic year, according to data compiled by Attendance Works and Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Before the pandemic, 25% of students attended a school with high levels of chronic absenteeism, but during the 2021-2022 academic year at the percentage rose to 66%, according to the report from Attendance Works, a nonprofit focusing on absenteeism, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, which focuses on high school graduation. Nearly 14.7 million students, or 29.7%, were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year.
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Undergraduate enrollment numbers increased during the fall semester for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic while the number of freshmen enrolling in colleges and universities declined, according to the National Student Research Clearinghouse Center (NSRCC).
Undergraduate enrollment at colleges and universities increased 2.1% compared to 2022 and 1.2% compared to 2021, with community colleges accounting for nearly 59% of the increase, according to the NSRCC. Freshmen enrollment declined by 3.6%, with bachelor programs seeing a 6.9% and 4.7% decline, respectively, at public and private four-year nonprofit institutions.
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Late Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case that may end the Biden administration’s circumvention of the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to Big Tech. The case was initially filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with various private plaintiffs who allege that social media platforms censored them at the behest of federal agencies. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty ruled for the plaintiffs on July 4, enjoining the agencies from communicating with platforms about “content moderation.” The Biden administration sought relief from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and lost again, making a Supreme Court clash inevitable.
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A new report from the Federal Reserve claims that the average American household actually saw an increase in its net worth during the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic.
As reported by Axios, the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which is released every three years, came out on Wednesday. It was lasted conducted in 2019, thus meaning the next iteration would be held after the pandemic, covering the three-year time period from start to finish.
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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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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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Gov. Tim Walz announced the appointment of one of his administration’s top attorneys to the Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Karl Procaccini, 40, has spent the last 4.5 years as general counsel and deputy chief of staff in the governor’s office. Depending on who you ask, the Connecticut native and Harvard Law grad has been regarded as either a prudent or overreaching legal advisor to Walz during the Covid-19 pandemic and riots in 2020 and 2021.
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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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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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State officials have removed more than 95,000 from Georgia’s Medicaid rolls, but one Georgia group says the move merely returns the program to how it was administered for its first 50 years.
State officials said that of the 95,578 who lost coverage, 89,168 were removed because of “a lack of information received … to make an eligibility determination.” The state indicated it has information that more than 20,000 of those “procedurally terminated” would not have been eligible for an extension.
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The U.S. poverty rate rose for the first time in 10 years as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with job losses, especially in the country’s biggest cities, among the largest contributing factors, according to a recently released U.S. Census Bureau report.
The rate increased from 12.3% in 2019 to 12.8% in 2021.
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U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) blasted the Biden administration for its ongoing failure in addressing the southwest border crisis, which is about to get a whole lot worse when Title 42 ends later this week.
The Iowa Republican said it’s time to move on her Build It Act, legislation allowing states to finish the border wall by using previously purchased materials.
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The quote from Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a useful way to begin addressing the Washington Post editorial board’s confident assertion that “’A collective national incompetence in government’” was at the root of the U.S.’s alleged failure vis-à-vis the coronavirus in 2020. According to the Post quoting from a recently released report (“Lessons from the Covid War”), “The United States started out ‘with more capabilities than any other country in the world,’ but “it ended up with 1 million dead.” Were he still around, one guesses Tolstoy would mock the conceit of the Post’s editorialists.
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by Betsy McCaughey Ready for another pandemic? New York City’s health commissioner announced last week that the influx of migrants from the southern border — more than 50,000 to New York City alone in the past year — is delivering contagious diseases, including tuberculosis and polio, to our neighborhoods. The same disease threats are also endangering other migrant destinations, including California, Texas and Florida. In a letter to physicians and health care administrators citywide, Commissioner Ashwan Vasan explained that “many people who recently arrived in NYC have lived in or traveled through countries with high rates of TB.” TB, short for tuberculosis, is a bacterial infection. It is treatable with antibiotics, but it generally takes six to nine months of medication to recover. Not a walk in the park. TB spreads through the air, like flu or a cold. Stand next to someone with TB for a long subway ride or sit next to them every day at school and you can catch it. New York City’s TB rate, at 6.1 cases per 100,000, is more than double the national rate. Close to 9 out of 10 (88 percent) of these TB cases are people born outside the United…
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Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor & Industry (L&I) on Wednesday told state representatives the commonwealth’s unemployment-claim (UC) backlog remains vast at 31,304 cases.
L&I officials testifying at a hearing of the state House Appropriations Committee in preparation for next fiscal year’s budget also said state residents calling the department regarding UC claims face an average wait time of 67 minutes. Acting L&I Secretary Nancy Walker said her agency is making progress in clearing these cases which reportedly numbered more than 35,000 last month. Such cases began to accumulate over the course of the coronavirus outbreak.
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Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health said no COVID-19 vaccination is recommended this spring/summer season, including for people at high risk of becoming seriously sick from the virus.
“Nearly everyone in Switzerland has been vaccinated and/or contracted and recovered from COVID-19. Their immune system has therefore been exposed to the coronavirus,” the Swiss health agency said.
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We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.
The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.
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As increasing evidence suggests the COVID-19 virus likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08) is introducing a bill that would ban taxpayer dollars from funding so-called gain-of-function research — or at least pause funding.
Gallagher joined U.S. Representatives Henry Cuellar (D-TX- 28) and Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA-01) this week introduced the Pausing Enhanced Pandemic Pathogen Research Act, which would stall taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research for five years, providing time to evaluate the risks and for proper safety standards and protocols to be implemented, the lawmakers say.
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Since the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arizona’s most-populous county has added tens of thousands more residents than any other county in America.
U.S. Census data released Thursday shows the county population increased by an estimated 130,950 since the April 1, 2020, decennial Census count. It was the only county to have added more than 100,000 people in that time.
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Like most polls, Gallup polls are usually paid advertisements for whomever commissions them and therefore deserving of as little attention. However, the indefatigable Sharyl Attkisson recently reported on the results of one such survey and that did draw my attention. Evidently, 47 percent of Americans say life will never go back to pre-pandemic normal. I was somewhat stunned! How could 53 percent be thinking we could go back?
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Most Americans are likely pleased that when they turn on their television, no longer are there talking heads and public health figures breathlessly discussing COVID-19 case counts and deaths. Broadly, the media as a whole is no longer incessantly reporting on the topic, and nationally, the federal public health emergency declared for the COVID-19 pandemic terminates on May 11.
While the old signs of the pandemic have virtually vanished, Americans won’t forget what their governments did to them.
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The education disruption caused by mass school closures and prolonged remote instruction beginning three years ago this month led many families to seek other learning options beyond an assigned district school. Emerging research reveals just how significant and sustained that shift was.
In a new report, “Where the Kids Went: Nonpublic Schooling and Demographic Change during the Pandemic Exodus from Public Schools,” Stanford economist Thomas Dee reveals that more than 1.2 million students left district schools during the pandemic response. That exodus endured throughout the 2021/2022 academic year, as families continued to opt for private schools and homeschooling even though most district schools reopened.
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America’s teachers’ unions exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to maximum effect, leveraging school lockdowns for which they lobbied to pursue political demands stretching far beyond their salaries and benefits – and helping drive a $190 billion windfall in taxpayer dollars to K-12 schools.
The public bore that cost, in children’s learning loss and mental health struggles; in the burdens the closures placed on parents already struggling to make ends meet in an economy crippled by government decree; and on the literal costs that the teachers’ unions passed on to taxpayers.
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used federal pandemic relief funds to create virtual courses for teachers about anti-racism and social justice, which encouraged teachers to engage with sources espousing critical race theory.
The CARES Act in 2020 included funds for governors to award to education-related entities via the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) Fund. Whitmer and state officials allotted $1.4 million to Michigan State University College of Education, the University of Michigan’s School of Education and Michigan Virtual to create professional learning modules for K-12 teachers.
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may still be mulling over a run for president, but the Republican looked and sounded every bit a contender for the GOP presidential nomination Friday evening in the first-in-the-nation caucus state.
DeSantis joined fellow Republican, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. at a packed, standing-room only stop at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, ostensibly to promote his new book, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.
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Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley asserts the war in Ukraine is about freedom and “one we have to win.”
The former South Carolina governor discussed national security and foreign policy with U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) Friday morning in suburban Des Moines at an event sponsored by the Bastion Institute.
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As negations move forward on an international pandemic treaty, Republican House members are pushing a bill that would check the pandemic powers of the World Health Organization.
U.S. Representatives Tom Tiffany (R-WI-07) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) joined a dozen of their Republican colleagues in introducing the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act.
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Lawmakers are demanding that President Joe Biden declassify documents related to the origins of COVID-19, in particular federal investigations into the matter.
The Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent that would require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify documents related to COVID’s origins. Republicans have a majority in the House, giving the legislation a chance, but whether Biden would sign it is in doubt.
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Tennessee Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) have introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate that would establish more oversight and increased transparency from the work of the World Health Organization (WHO).
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In the wake of revelations the U.S. Energy Department now believes the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from an accidental lab leak in China, Republicans are calling for investigations and accountably. One presidential candidate, health science entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, says China owes reparations and should be expelled from the World Trade Organization.
“Now we know what we should have known all along: COVID-19 began in a lab in China,” Ramaswamy, who launched his campaign last week, said in a statement. “As President I will extract reparations from the Communist Chinese Party, using every financial lever available to us.”
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Seattle Public Schools may have to close some of its schools over the next few years as the district battles budget shortages and plummeting enrollment after the COVID-19 pandemic.
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In his state of the state address last month, Gov. Tony Evers boasted about Wisconsin’s low unemployment rate. What the Democrat failed to mention is Wisconsin’s dismal labor participation rate, a number that underscores one of the biggest economic challenges facing Badger State businesses.
“Our labor force participation rate is worse today than it was at the bottom point of COVID when our economy was shut down,” said Scott Manley, Executive Vice President of Government Relations for Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.
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TennCare currently has $1.1 billion in its reserves and expects it to cost $500 million of those reserves over the next year as it redetermines Medicaid eligibility for those additional 500,000 members who joined the plan over the past three years.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, states were not allowed to remove those who are no longer eligible for the program as previous. Starting on April 1, states must start that redetermination process and will have a year to complete it.
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A U.S. government report released Monday estimates that there could have been more than $60 billion in unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic.
The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office says that figure is an estimate spread over the entire unemployment system and should be “interpreted with caution.”
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