Category Archives: COVID

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When it comes to #VaccineMandates, workers have the power!

We have previously noted that one of the problems with vaccine mandates is that not everyone will comply, and if people’s jobs are lost, then companies will have their own problems.

From The Wall Street Journal:

    How Hard Should Employers Push Vaccines? Inside One Company’s Dilemma

    As Delta variant spreads, Taylor Farms nudges 22,000 employees toward vaccination

    By Jesse Newman | August 19, 2021 | 11:25 AM EDT

    In a sprawling food processing plant on the outskirts of Nashville, Jon Matthews is expected to be everywhere. He oversees one million pounds of produce that flow into the plant daily to be sliced and separated into salads and sandwiches.

    For months, Mr. Matthews’ employer, produce giant Taylor Farms, has been engaged in an all-hands effort to cajole its 22,000 employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19, offering on-site vaccination clinics and cash incentives. The company founder, Bruce Taylor, recorded a public-service announcement that plays in the hallways, employees said.

    Mr. Matthews, 50, is among the many unpersuaded. The inventory supervisor is uncomfortable with the novel technology behind the vaccines and remains unconvinced it will protect him from infection, particularly in light of the Delta variant, which appears to break through faster than earlier strains.

    “Thirty percent of me says it might be the smart thing to do,” Mr. Matthews said.

    Mr. Taylor, his boss, has no such doubts. “I believe the vaccine is a miracle,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we take advantage of it?”

In a sane and free world, individuals will have the right to believe as they wish. In George Orwell’s 1984, the government of Oceania had its Ministry of Truth, which was supposed to manipulate all information, to push the people into all thinking one way. The Soviet Union tried the same thing, with the government in control of all publications and media, and with Правда (“Truth”) and Известия (“News”) as people’s primary sources of information, their thoughts were as government-guided as they could be.

Alas! Today’s left do not seem to believe that other people have a right to think differently, which is why they want Twitter and Facebook to censor things, in their favor, of course.

    An impasse over vaccinations is bedeviling the corporate world. On one side are employers and employees eager to see theor co-workers be vaccinated, both out of health concerns and to head off the risk of an outbreak that slows production or shutters a workplace. On the other are the workers who see it as their right to decide when and if to vaccinate.

    Some large companies, including Walmart Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Tyson Foods Inc. have imposed vaccine mandates. But the balance of power isn’t necessarily with every employer. Taylor’s 14 U.S. plants, which supply restaurants like Taco Bell Corp. and grocers like Whole Foods market, are already short some 1,500 employees. The tight labor market means that Mr. Taylor and others must be careful not to alienate workers who might go elsewhere.

    “As much as I’d like to say it’s 100% required, I don’t want to lose 10% of my workforce,” Mr. Taylor said.

He doesn’t want to lose 10% of his workforce, huh? Some nursing homes in Kentucky are worried about losing “the majority of (their) staff,” and the high “potential to lose members, especially nurses, when there are few replacement opportunities in my area.” Of course, patient care personnel are licensed, unlike hamburger flippers, meaning that it’s difficult to just go out on the street to find people to fill those jobs.

There’s more at the original. But in something unusual for the Journal, the reporting that Walmart has imposed a vaccine mandate isn’t quite accurate:

    Walmart, for example, will require all of its corporate and regional staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by October 4 unless they have an “approved exception,” namely, a religious or medical reason not to be vaccinated. But it isn’t asking the same of store associates and warehouse workers, to whom it is instead offering a $150 incentive for getting vaccinated (it previously offered $75) and paid time off. McDonald’s has taken a similar approach and is requiring its US corporate workers to be vaccinated by September 27 while offering restaurant employees at the locations it owns four hours of paid leave to get a vaccine (most McDonald’s locations are owned by franchises and not directly by the company). AT&T is mandating vaccines for managers and starting negotiations with unions about a similar rule for other workers. Uber and Lyft are requiring their corporate employees to get vaccinated to return to the office, but they’re not mandating shots for drivers.

Translation: corporations are issuing vaccine mandates for the more highly paid positions, the ones in which they have far more leverage in that the people in those positions have far more to lose if they resign or get fired for failing to get vaccinated, while the lower-paid hourly positions, the ones where employee losses can be far more quickly replaced with people who will require minimal training, and the ones in which people have less to lose if they do not obey a vaccine mandate, don’t get ‘mandated.’

    Taylor Farms is in no position to impose a mandate. On average, the company has raised its hourly wage 18% in the past year and a half, with particularly steep raises in competitive labor markets including Florida, Tennessee and Texas. Wages in one location increased 42%, the company said.

He probably shouldn’t have said that last part, as now other Taylor employees will be demanding that 42% raise!

    The produce giant’s Tennessee plant competes with Tyson Foods Inc. and General Mills inc. for workers, and is short 180 employees. It cannot afford to alienate any would-be recruits. “We hold a job fair and 10 people show up,” Mr. Taylor said. “Five people take the job and no one shows up on Monday.”

And so it goes. For the most part, employees have the power, not employers. Due to the ridiculous extensions of unemployment, people are being paid enough not to work that there’s no incentive for the minimum skill people to go out and get a job. Then, when you include health care workers who have to be licensed in some way, you have another group of workers who can decline the vaccine and companies have to either accept it, or lose very difficult to replace workers.

It’s already happening. Here in the Bluegrass State, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) noted:

    “To our south, where it always starts, where we can see our future, we are continuing to see state after state not only get very low, but completely run out of [intensive care unit] beds,” Beshear said at the state Capitol. “In Kentucky, our hospital capacity, really the capacity that we have based on the staffing that we have, is reaching a critical point. We are going to be out of hospital capacity very, very soon.”

It seems that our Governor doesn’t have much respect for our Southern brethren!

    The governor said 21 hospitals across the commonwealth now face “critical staffing shortages,” as the number of new cases and rate of Kentuckians testing positive for the virus continues to rise. To “allow for additional help,” Beshear said he signed an order on Wednesday that grants licensed health care providers in other states permission to practice on an emergency basis in Kentucky.

How, I have to ask, is President Biden’s executive order — which currently applies only to nursing homes, not hospitals — going to help anything? Kentucky cannot afford to lose a single nurse!

This is what happens when Our Betters decide that they Know Best What’s For Our Own Good; they can never see the big picture, never can see what’s outside of their own little minds. Laughably, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte called forced vaccination opponents “authoritarians” and wrote, in the same article, “The irony of all this is that the best way to make this problem go away is to do the very thing that the anti-vaxxers hate most: Impose as many vaccine mandates as possible, in every way possible.” Sometimes the left can’t even see themselves.

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The unintended consequences of the do-gooders * Updated! *

It looks like Bishop John Stowe isn’t the only one threatening his employees with termination if they don’t take the vaccine:

    Cheryl Bettigole, MD, from her Twitter biography.

    Many Philadelphia health workers remain unvaccinated two months before shots will be required

    by Laura McCrystal | Wednesday, August 18, 2021

    Acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said many institutions have applauded Philadelphia’s new vaccine mandate for health care workers, but noted that many employees remain unvaccinated.

    More than a dozen long-term care facilities in Philadelphia have less than 50% of their staff vaccinated, she said.

    ”If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else,” she said at a Wednesday news briefing. “Health care is not for you.”

Let’s tell the truth here: health care employees at all levels have been exposed to constant, continuous education and pleas to get vaccinated. If they actually wanted to get vaccinated, they would have by now. One might ask why, in a city which gave 81.44% of its votes has so many unvaccinated people.

Like so many on the left,[1]Given this tweet of hers, I think there’s sufficient evidence to associate Dr Bettigole with the political left. Dr Bettigole not only knows what’s best for other people, but insists that it’s her way of the highway. The problem with that is that many, who have already resisted the months’ long pressure to take the vaccines, are going to continue to refuse. What will happen to health care facilities in our nation’s sixth largest city if, say, 25% or 35% of the workforce has to be discharged because they have refused to be vaccinated?

Employers across the nation are complaining that they cannot get people to fill job openings, and people working in health care settings aren’t just burger flippers at McDonald’s, who can be trained in short order. It takes two years to train an Associate degree Registered Nurse, four if she is going for her baccalaureate degree. It can take between four and twelve weeks to train a Certified Nursing Assistant. Requirements to become a CNA in Pennsylvania can be found here, requirements which include a criminal background check.`

Registered Nurses are a lot harder to find than CNAs, and there is only so much that Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs) are allowed to do.

As we have previously noted, of the fifteen city zip codes with the lowest vaccination rate, only two are plurality white; in the other 13, four are plurality Hispanic, and nine are plurality black. Seven of those plurality black zip codes have an over 80% black population.[2]19131, 19132, 19138, 19139, 19141, 19142, and 19151, including the neighborhoods of Wynnefield, Overbrook, West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion, West Oak Lane, East Germantown … Continue reading Of the fifteen most heavily vaccinated zip codes, two are plurality white and twelve are absolute majority white. Black Philadelphians have been more vaccine resistant that whites, Asians and Hispanics; if Dr Bettigole carries through with her regulations to fire non-vaccinated health care employees, she will be firing a disproportionate number of black employees.

Tell me just how that’s going to work, will you?

    The city will require all health care workers to be vaccinated by Oct. 15, unless they have medical or religious exemptions. Employees and students of higher-education institutions must also be vaccinated, Bettigole announced last week.

    The mandate for health-care workers includes employees, contractors, students, and volunteers who work in-person at an organization that provides health-care services. Home health aides and nursing home employees are also included.

Home health aides, huh? Home health aides must pass CNA requirements in Pennsylvania, as well as others. What happens if 10% or 20% decline to be vaccinated? Are the clients they serve simply going to go unserved?

    Bettigole said the city hasn’t received much pushback about the mandate, and has “heard from some very happy people.” But officials have also received questions in the last week about health care workers who do not want the vaccine, she said.

    ”We all know that it is simply unacceptable to take the risk of passing a potentially fatal infection to the patients who come to us for help,” Bettigole said.

As Governor Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) case shows, fully vaccinated persons can contract the virus. Being vaccinated means that, if you contract the virus, you will probably have less serious, and perhaps no, symptoms, but you can still contract the virus; vaccination does not stop a person from passing the virus on to others.

Nursing homes have always had problems keeping people, because, to be blunt about it, they are miserable places to work. Dr Bettigole, however, wants to make it doubly hard, and can a significant percentage of the workers already in such settings. I suppose that she thinks that this will be the ‘stick’ to get the rest of the employees vaccinated, but I have to ask: has she considered that, in an environment where we have been very free about granting eligibility for unemployment compensation, and where many ‘workers’ have chosen not to work because the state and the federal government are paying them not to work, that some of those facilities might just have to close?
———————-
Update! 5:00 PM

Well, that didn’t take long!

    AP Source: Biden to require vaccines for nursing home staff

    By Zeke Miller | 4:31 PM EDT

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration will require that nursing home staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.

    Biden will announce the move Wednesday afternoon in a White House address as the administration continues to look for ways to use mandates to encourage vaccine holdouts to get shots. A senior administration official confirmed the announcement on condition of anonymity to preview the news before Biden’s remarks.

    The new mandate, in the form of a forthcoming regulation to be issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, could take effect as soon as next month.

    Hundreds of thousands of nursing home workers are not vaccinated, according to federal data, despite those facilities bearing the brunt of the early COVID-19 outbreak and their workers being among the first in the country to be eligible for shots.

    It comes as the Biden administration seeks to raise the costs for those who have yet to get vaccinated, after months of incentives and giveaways proved to be insufficient to drive tens of millions of Americans to roll up their sleeves.

There’s more at the original.

But the same problems exist: there are a lot of nursing home staffers, RNs, LPNs and CNAs, as well as those who are not involved in direct patient care, who have chosen against the vaccines. President Biden is going to force all nursing homes to mandate vaccination, which means that all nursing homes are going to lose a significant amount of staff.

The more the government tries to force people to do things, the more resistance will be encountered.

References

References
↑1 Given this tweet of hers, I think there’s sufficient evidence to associate Dr Bettigole with the political left.
↑2 19131, 19132, 19138, 19139, 19141, 19142, and 19151, including the neighborhoods of Wynnefield, Overbrook, West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion, West Oak Lane, East Germantown and West Philadelphia.
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No #FakeNews here, huh?

The Washington Post tweeted:

And here’s the story:

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has sought to ban mask mandates in schools, tests positive for the coronavirus

    by Felicia Sonmez | August 17, 2021 | 5:48 PM EDT

    Abbott is among the Republican governors who have resisted public-health mandates aimed at stemming the tide of the virus’s delta variant, which has caused a new spike in cases as the country attempts to reopen schools, restaurants and other businesses.

    A spokesman for Abbott said the governor is “fully vaccinated against COVID-19, in good health, and currently experiencing no symptoms.” Texas first lady Cecilia Abbott has tested negative, and everyone with whom the governor was in close contact Tuesday has been notified, the spokesman, Mark Miner, said in a statement.

    However, videos and photos posted online by Abbott’s gubernatorial campaign show him delivering remarks and mingling with a large, maskless crowd of more than 100 people indoors at an event in Texas on Monday night.

    Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it had contacted those who were present at the event in the wake of his positive diagnosis.

    “The Governor has been testing daily, and today was the first positive test result,” Miner said Tuesday. “Governor Abbott is in constant communication with his staff, agency heads, and government officials to ensure that state government continues to operate smoothly and efficiently. The Governor will isolate in the Governor’s Mansion and continue to test daily.”

This is a screen cap of the Post’s tweet, in case the paper deletes it. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original. But here’s the important part: though the Post was trying to slam the Governor for resisting mask mandates, today was his first positive test, and he has been “fully vaccinated” against the virus.

The other important part? The Post’s tweet was only 106 characters and spaces, meaning that there were 174 more characters and spaces available, yet the Post tweet couldn’t take the effort to note that the Governor is fully vaccinated. While it’s in the third paragraph of the story, and before the first ad, it can’t be considered ‘burying the lede,’ Washington Post stories are hidden behind a paywall,[1]Yes, I’m spending good money to subscribe to the Post, because both of my readers deserve good content. and some people who saw the tweet couldn’t access the story. How many thousands and thousands of others read, and perhaps retweeted, the tweet without ever checking?

So, the Governor is fully vaccinated, and being tested daily, but the Post wants to slam him because he opposes mask mandates, something which puts him within what the people of the Lone Star State want.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I’m spending good money to subscribe to the Post, because both of my readers deserve good content.
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The Lord hears the cry of the poor So, why would Bishop John Stowe make some Catholic employees poorer?

One of the hymns sung frequently at Mass, at least in my parish, is The Lord hears the cry of the poor.

So, in a Church which is very concerned about the poorer among us, I have to ask: why would the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M. Conv., Bishop of Lexington, throw people out of work if they refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19?

    The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

    Diocese Mandates COVID-19 Vaccination for Catholic Center Employees

    August 17, 2021

    LEXINGTON — Employees at the Catholic Center of the Catholic Diocese of Lexington will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of their employment, starting on Sept. 1, Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv. of Lexington announced today. Pastors who choose to implement this policy at the parish level on Sept. 1 have his support; further mandates may be forthcoming. The bishop also reinstated the policy of requiring masks for all employees at work at the Catholic Center.

    “This is an urgent matter of public health and safety. There is no religious exemption for Catholics to being vaccinated, and Pope Francis has repeatedly called this a moral obligation,” said Bishop Stowe. “The health care system is now overwhelmed by a crisis caused primarily by those who refuse to protect themselves and others by getting vaccinated. This is unacceptable, and our diocese now joins those employers who have already made this basic commitment to the common good a requirement.”

    The Catholic Center is located on W. Main Street in Lexington. The Catholic Diocese of Lexington covers 50 counties in Central and Eastern Kentucky, with 59 parishes and missions serving some 46,000 Catholics.

It’s one thing to require COVID-19 vaccination of any new hires; it’s something entirely different for the Bishop of Lexington, who, supposedly, does hear the cry of the poor, to throw people out of work if they refuse to take the vaccine.

I will admit it; I have been critical of the political positions of Bishop Stowe. Wikipedia noted:

    In January 2019, Stowe wrote an op-ed that condemned Nick Sandmann and other students for sporting apparel supporting President Donald Trump during the 2019 March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. He said the slogan “Make America Great Again” “supports a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies”.

While Bishop Roger Foys of Covington later apologized for jumping the gum in criticizing Mr Sandmann and his group, if the Most Reverend Stowe ever did, I have missed it.

The USCCB opposes the legislation due to the fact that it does not contain sufficient protection for matters of religion and conscience, and might require Catholic diocese and other organizations to hire or retain open homosexuals or transsexuals living in a state of open scandal. We have previously noted Bishop Stowe’s support for homosexuals, and that the diocese hosts St Paul’s Catholic Church, which is very openly “LGBTQ+” accepting, only a couple of miles from the cathedral parish, Cathedral of Christ the King, where the Bishop resides and has his seat. Bishop Stowe is fully aware of St Paul’s ‘mission.’

But now? The Bishop, who hears the cry of the poor, would, apparently, make any employees who decline to take the vaccine poorer, even though many other American bishops have recognized an exception for conscience. “John, our Bishop,” as our pastor says in Mass, would consign current employees who have moral objections to the vaccine to unemployment. While the linked article does not specifically state that they would be fired if they do not take the first dose of the vaccine in the next two weeks, making such a “condition of employment” can mean nothing else.

YouTube video of the hymn below the fold. Continue reading →

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Yup, we could see it coming!

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) imposed yet another mask mandate, this time on all public and private schools, but it seems as though masks do not stop the spread of COVID-19. It looks like we can count on yet another wasted school year. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

    Ky. superintendent closes schools due to COVID-19: ‘This will be a tough year.’

    By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | August 16, 2021 07:40 AM

    Lee County Public Schools will be closed Monday through Wednesday after a surge in COVID-19 cases, Superintendent Sarah Wasson said.

    The district in Beattyville is one of the first in Kentucky to shut down this school year as a result of the coronavirus.

    “This will be a tough year and we don’t want to have to shut down this early, but if we can determine who is positive now we believe we can stay in school longer,” Wasson said in a statement released Sunday night.

There’s more at the original.

Interestingly enough, the article was originally entitled “COVID-19 shuts down Lee County Public Schools for three days,” or at least that’s what the browser tab says. I guess that by not revealing to readers in the headline that it was in small, poor, rural Lee County, far from Lexington, the editors think more people will open the story to read it. Continue reading →

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The left blame evil reich wing Republicans for lower vaccination rates, but black Americans are the least vaccine compliant

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter photo was taken in a bar.

Whenever I need a good chuckle, I will go to see what new articles Amanda Marcotte has posted on Salon. She wrote, at 1:07 PM EDT on Thursday, August 12th, It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms. As usual, Miss Marcotte has blamed the evil reich-wing Trump supporters as the problem:

    I really wanted to get back to my spin class. And for a couple of months, I did just that. Exercising at home for the past year was fine, but nothing beats a 45-minute spin class for leaving one red-faced and sopping wet with sweat. But it’s that “sopping wet” part that became a problem this week when the gym sent out a memo bringing back their indoor mask mandate. This isn’t a 5-minute jaunt in a grocery store with a mask. Exercising with a sweat-soaked mask is like being waterboarded. So I canceled my class and sent a polite but angry note to my gym. Philadelphia’s new regulations allow businesses to choose between mask and vaccine mandates, and they chose poorly, penalizing those who did the right thing to coddle those who refuse. Masking the already vaccinated to protect the unvaccinated helps a little, but is a little like trying to cover someone in a rainstorm by holding an index card over their head.

Miss Marcotte is just hopping mad that her rights are being violated! Of course, she wants other people’s rights, their privacy rights — something, as an abortion-up-until-the-final-contraction supporter she otherwise strongly supports — to take a back seat to her being able to go to her spin class. When it comes to other people’s rights, she’s kind of like Dirty Harry. Continue reading →

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So much for Andy Beshear asking When people don't do what he asks, he responds by issuing orders

Two stories from the Lexington Herald-Leader, both dated today:

    Most Kentucky schools are making masks optional, even as COVID-19 surges. Here’s why.

    By Alex Acquisto | August 10, 2021 | 12:48 PM

    In a cramped room with members of the Harlan County Public Schools Board of Education, Darla Heflin steadied herself behind a microphone.

    “I’ll be very quick,” Heflin told the listening board and Superintendent Brent Roark on July 27. “We do believe that masks pose physical, mental and emotional distress on our students and on our children.”

    Heflin explained that her son, a rising eighth-grader, asked to be picked up from school twice last year because wearing a mask plagued him with headaches, dizziness and nausea. “He’s not used to wearing them,” she said. “We don’t make him wear them outside of school. I’m here believing that you all will vote to make them optional. We do not want masks to be mandatory for our students.” Continue reading →

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If it’s just those evil reich wing Trumpelstiltskins who are refusing to be vaccinated, why doesn’t Philadelphia have an 80% vaccination rate?

Our good friends on the left love to blame evil reich wing Republicans for lower COVID-19 vaccination rates than they believe are acceptable. Of course, only 100% vaccination compliance is acceptable to the left, because the needs of the state outweigh the rights of the individual.

Surprisingly enough, that “anti racist news organization,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, loath as they are to print anything which could be construed negatively on BIPOCs[1]Black, indigenous, people of color., included an interactive map of city vaccination rates by zip code:

Philadelphia’s least-vaccinated zip codes at the beginning of the summer remain its most undervaccinated now, despite door-to-door outreach, targeted clinics, a lottery, and advertising to encourage people to get COVID-19 inoculations.

As the delta variant spreads, and the threat of other variants looms, these parts of the city are the most vulnerable to serious illness and death.

Five of the city’s zip codes had less than 40% of their residents fully or partially vaccinated as of Aug. 9, according to city data — rates that are on par with Arkansas and Louisiana.

You can click on the image, which is a screen capture, to enlarge it, but it is not interactive on this site. I did, however, rather painstakingly create a Microsoft Excel file of the of the data contained in the interactive file, including percentage having received at least one dose of vaccine, the median household income, racial demographics,[2]In the Inquirer’s interactive map, “white” is not capitalized, but “black”, “Latino” and “Asian” are. and the neighborhood names, something traditionally important in Philadelphia.

You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Of the 15 most heavily vaccinated zip codes, white Philadelphians are the plurality in 14 of them, with over 50% of the population in 12 of them, and 49% and 47% in the other two. Only in zip code 19104 are whites not the plurality.

In only two of the fifteen zip codes with the lowest rates of vaccination, 19116 and 19135, do white Philadelphians compose the largest racial/ethnic group. In nine if the fifteen zip codes with the lowest vaccination rates, blacks make up 70% or more of the population, and over 90% in zip codes 19132 and 19138.

It’s true enough that it takes an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me to notice the racial disparity in those statistics, but I’d bet I’m not the only one. One wonders: just whom publisher Elizabeth Hughes will fire for looking up and printing those racially disparate statistics.

In the 2020 elections, Philadelphians gave 603,790 (81.44%) of their votes to Joe Biden, and only 132,740 (17.90%) to President Trump; Mr Biden’s margin of 471,050 votes in the city was far larger than his 81,660 statewide margin; without Philadelphia, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State by 389,390 votes.[3]This is clearly evidence that Philly needs to be walled off, like Manhattan in Escape from New York, all the inhabitants therein considered convicted felons and not be allowed to vote. If the vaccination resistance is all among the evil reich wing Trumpelstiltskins, why aren’t over 80% of people in the City of Brotherly Love vaccinated?

References

References
↑1 Black, indigenous, people of color.
↑2 In the Inquirer’s interactive map, “white” is not capitalized, but “black”, “Latino” and “Asian” are.
↑3 This is clearly evidence that Philly needs to be walled off, like Manhattan in Escape from New York, all the inhabitants therein considered convicted felons and not be allowed to vote.
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Fauci Expects A Lot Of Vaccine Mandates Once FDA Approval Is Achieved

Sometimes Dr. Doom is correct, sometimes he’s not. Sometimes he’s political…OK, most of the time he’s political. And a mask hypocrite. But, he’s probably 80% correct on this

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Expect ‘a flood’ of COVID-19 vaccine mandates after full FDA approval

As soon as the Food and Drug Administration issues a full approval for a COVID-19 vaccine, there will be “a flood” of vaccine mandates at businesses and schools across the nation, Dr. Anthony Fauci told USA TODAY’s editorial board on Friday.

Mandates aren’t going to happen at the federal level, but vaccine approval will embolden many groups, he predicted.

“Organizations, enterprises, universities, colleges that have been reluctant to mandate at the local level will feel much more confident,” he said.

“They can say, ‘If you want to come to this college or this university, you’ve got to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this plant, you have to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this enterprise, you’ve got to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this hospital, you’ve got to get vaccinated.'”

He is surely correct on this. There will be lots of companies and private entities which will look towards vaccine mandates once the EPA approves the vaccines. Whether that will be be straight up “get it or you’re out” or “get it or be subject to week/bi-weekly testing” remains to be seen. I know of several companies, including mine, where the upper levels have discussed or are discussing mandates. They are legally allowed to do so now, but, there could be issues, legally, with the vaccines being in emergency use status. That’s where lots of educational institutions of all levels, local, county, and state mandates, and the potential Department of Defense, mandates get in trouble: emergency use. Even requiring visitors to show vaccination can be tricky due to emergency use status.

Once you get EPA approval, all that ends. Fauci is wrong regarding the federal level, since the DOD is already considering, and the White House requires all visitors to be vaccinated. They’ve also required international travelers to be vaccinated or be tested. The feds, from the White House to Congressional Dems to the CDC and more will surely push hard for schools and private entities to instituted a vaccine mandate of some sort.

Because in the current political environment that won’t happen, Fauci said masks are the next best thing. Schools are crucial for children’s mental health and intellectual, physical and social development, so it’s important they stay open.

“I would rather have a child be a little bit uncomfortable with a mask on and be healthy than a comfortable child without a mask in an ICU,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me why you would want to not protect the children.”

And how many times have we seen Fauci without a mask in violation of his beliefs? And, heck, Joe Biden’s executive order. Same with Biden, Jen Psaki, and other Biden admin members?

The epidemic in the United States could be ended once and for all if everyone would get vaccinated, Fauci said. Barring that, he worries we’re in it for the long term.

Even if 100% are vaccinated, COVID19 will still be here. And people will still get it, as the Delta variant has broken through. And the vaccines were only around 94-96% effective in stopping infection. You just do not get full on COVID symptoms. They’re working on developing oral pills, which would be great. But, yeah, mandates are coming.