Category Archives: COVID

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The left cannot tolerate dissent.

Since the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court invalidated Governor Tom Wolf’s in-school mask mandate, local school boards have been — albeit slowly — relaxing their COVID-19 restrictions, not because the local school boards really want to do so, but because much of the public demand it.

    More Philly-area schools are ending mask mandates, but the question of how and when is dividing communities

    The shifting landscape — in absence of any unified standard — has brought new tension over how to move beyond pandemic restrictions that have shaped the last two years.

    by Maddie Hanna | Sunday, February 20, 2022

    As a group of students walked out of Conestoga High School a little more than a week ago in defiance of mask requirements — banging lockers and shouting “Freedom!” along the way — they set off a social media feud that reflected a broader debate.

    With omicron retreating, and mandates at the state and city level being rolled back, suburban schools that have maintained universal masking in line with public health recommendations now find themselves asking: When, and how, can they move beyond the restrictions that have shaped the last two years?

No, they “maintained universal masking” in line with state government orders; many districts were ending or at least reducing the restrictions last fall, before Governor Wolf stepped in. He had previously said that he would not impose such a mandate, leaving it up to local authorities, but when they didn’t do what he wanted voluntarily, he used a trick to get around the voter-passed constitutional amendments limiting his power. The reporter, Maddie Hanna, knew this; she was one of the three reporters credited with the story noting the Governor’s mask mandate!

    But not everyone agrees on the right approach.

    While a growing number of health-care professionals have called for school mandates to end, the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics have continued to endorse universal masking in schools given still-high transmission levels. (The CDC said last week it’s considering a change to its mask guidance, though it was unclear how that might apply to schools.)

The Inquirer, which editorially favors all of the restrictions, and even more, that have been imposed on the public, illustrated the article with a photo of people holding up signs in favor of universal masking in a Havorford Township school board meeting.

But the most important passage of the story might not have been one Miss Hanna intended, but I spotted:

    In Wallingford-Swarthmore, one mother, believing the district has moved to optional masking too quickly, started crying while describing her fear that parental discord would now be reflected by children; others worried about risks to immunocompromised or disabled students, concerns that have spurred lawsuits.

    In West Chester and Downingtown, residents are petitioning to remove school board directors for ordering masking, while in Tredyffrin/Easttown — where threats following the Conestoga walkout prompted the high school to close for a day — a father was banned from district property after giving a fiery speech in the boys’ wrestling locker room encouraging defiance of the mask mandate: “They cannot defeat you if you stick together. Do not let them f— with your minds.”

Nothing in the current referenced story, or the ones internally linked, stated that this unnamed father advocated violence, or issued or was connected with any threat, but Conestoga High School banned him from school property for a “fiery speech”. But the father was right: if the students stick together, and ditch their masks en masse, they will win . . . and the school board cannot tolerate that.

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Could Philly be ending its COVID mandates soon?

Cheryl Bettigole, from BillyPenn.

We noted, on February 3rd, that Philadelphia’s Health Commissioner, Cheryl Bettigole, said that lifting the city’s COVID-19 mandates would likely be several months away.

Of course, Dr Bettigole has an appointed position, not an elected one, and it seems that the elected Democrats who control the City of Brotherly Love might be moving somewhat faster than she would like:

The vaccine mandate for dining inside restaurants was being enforced by restaurant hostesses, and one has to wonder just how diligently these minimum wage workers were doing so. As we have previously noted, there was a theft of some 5,000 blank vaccination cards from the Penn Medicine Clinic in Philly’s Center City, and two nurses in Amityville, New York were arrested for selling faked COVID-19 vaccination cards. How could anyone expect poorly-paid restaurant hostesses to scrutinize vaccination cards, and spot fakes? And how would anyone not think that a $20 bill, presented when the hostess asked, “Ihre Papiere, bitte,” would often get prospective diners through?

The city government was depending on people who were not their employees, and encouraging a black market in faked cards at the same time. And I will be honest here: I absolutely support people forging vaccination cards, and hope that there are thousands upon thousands of those black marketeers, and that no more of them get caught.

    And if cases continue to decline, the mask mandate could also lift some time later.

    The benchmarks would create a novel system where restrictions could ease when overall illness falls and be reimposed in the event of a COVID-19 resurgence. The effect could ease the bite on hotels and restaurants, which have lost significant business during the pandemic, while also protecting people’s health and reducing the burden of illness on hospitals and caregivers.

    Relaxed mandates won’t be welcomed universally in the city. Jennifer Kolker, associate dean for public health practice at Drexel University, said last week she thought states were moving too quickly to end their vaccine mandates. “I would love to see them maintain the vaccine mandate,” she said before the city’s plan came to light.

Well, of course she would; the Karens of our society always want stuff like that.

Further down:

    Business was down 37% in Philadelphia’s leisure and hospitality industry through the second quarter of 2021 compared to the same time in 2019, before the pandemic began, according to a report last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That’s greater than the national drop over the same time period of 13%. The industry is the city’s fourth-biggest job sector and 76% of its workers live in Philadelphia.

    (Ben) Fileccia (director of operations & strategy for the Philadelphia Restaurant and Lodging Association) and others in the industry said there have been hotels that have lost events and conferences to competitors in the city’s suburbs because those areas did not have mandates.

In other words, people are tired of the mandates and restrictions, and have been voting with their actions, and their wallets, against them. The greatest victims? The hospitality industry’s workers, three-quarters of whom live in Philly, the poorest of the 10 most populous U.S. cities, and the only big city with a poverty rate above 20%.

Of course, for highly paid people like Commissioner Bettigole and Dean Kolker, for people like Mayor Jim Kenney, the struggles of the working class are abstractions, something that they can neatly measure against the probabilities of contracting the virus. To them, the need to put food on the table is no different from the goal of not contracting the virus, but to the single mother with hungry kids to feed, the need to feed her children is far more immediate than the probabilities of contracting COVID-19.

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Voting with their faces The peasants are revolting

Philip Bump, a national correspondent for The Washington Post, made an observation which he really didn’t think through:

    Dealt a bad hand, Democrats are poised to make it worse

    The collapse of containment

    by Philip Bump | Wednesday, February 9, 2022 | 4:27 PM EST

    Before my wife popped into a convenience store on Monday to grab a soda, she put on a mask. That is the rule in New York state, after all: masks to be worn indoors even when vaccinated. She’d probably have worn a mask anyway, with an unvaccinated kid at home, cases in our area still high and test positivity at 10 percent.

    As she put it on, a man leaving the store mocked her. “Gotta get that mask on!” he said — while not wearing a mask, of course. There was a brief, condescending exchange that culminated with my wife responding using language that the editors of The Post would ask I not include in this article.

    It’s a useful incident to consider when reflecting on how the debate over containing the coronavirus has progressed. The man was not adhering to the state mandate, but, as of Thursday, there will be no mandate to which he needs to adhere. New York, like a number of other blue states, is rescinding its state-level mask guidance. Here, the mandate was implemented at the outset of the omicron variant surge. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) went further, announcing an end to masking in schools at the end of the month.

There’s more at the original. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read it here as well.

What did Mr Bump miss? He wrote, “The man was not adhering to the state mandate, but, as of Thursday, there will be no mandate to which he needs to adhere.” It’s pretty clear that there was no mask mandate to which he needed to adhere on Monday, either, in that he didn’t adhere to it, and there were no consequences to his declining to wear a mask other than Mrs Bump apparently using language toward him that the editors of the Post would prefer not to print.

There is no statewide mask mandate in Kentucky, though there surely would have been had the General Assembly not curtailed Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) executive authority under KRS 39A. Yet the Kroger company KR: (%), which operates grocery stores throughout the Commonwealth, had issued its own mask mandate for its stores, and the Kroger our family uses, on Bypass Road in Richmond, still has a mandatory mask requirement sign beside the doors.

While I have not taken a precise count, observationally fewer than half of the customers in the store wear masks; I certainly do not.

    Murphy and fellow Democrats like Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (N.Y.) are linking the shifts to the decline in cases after the spike that accompanied the emergence of the omicron variant. But they’re also acknowledging in the news media that the changes in policy are driven by the broad, bipartisan exhaustion with the pandemic. The New York Times reported that Murphy conducted focus groups measuring that frustration and that his decision to rescind mask mandates for schools was linked to that frustration.

    This is politics, of course, and the will of the voters is important to track. But allowing the impression to set that politics is the central driver for the change — an impression that’s hard to avoid at this point — Democratic leaders are both undercutting their ability to respond to the pandemic moving forward and undercutting two years of rhetoric.

Also see: William Teach: With Midterms Coming, Democrat Governors Break From Biden On Mandates

What? An elected politician, paying attention to the will of the voters? Heaven forfend! But, as the shoppers in Kroger here, and as the man who mocked Mrs Bump, did, people are voting with their faces, people are disobeying the mask mandates wherever they can, and they are able to do so because no one is enforcing them. Certainly no one at Kroger is doing so, and even some of their employees are wearing the masks below their noses. The convenience store into which Mrs Bump walked didn’t enforce the mask mandate on the customer who mocked Mrs Bump. With 2022 being an election year, it is not much of a surprise that elected officials have taken notice.

Mr Bump wrote that the Democratic leaders who are ending mask mandates are undercutting their ability to respond to the panicdemic pandemic going forward, but the truth is different: their ability to respond has already been undercut by public fatigue and public non-compliance. The peasants, Mr Bump fears, are revolting.

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If everyone is going to be exposed to #COVID19 anyway, why are we bothering with restrictions?

As we noted on February 3rd, while other places, including entire countries, are reducing or eliminating COVID-19 restrictions, Philadelphia’s tinpot dictators want to keep restrictions in place for months. Even worse, when school districts in Pennsylvania, but outside of Philadelphia, were so graciously granted permission to make masking optional, some overly worried parents sued the schools, trying to require that the mask mandates be kept in place, and federal Judge Wendy Beetlestone ordered the Perkiomen Valley School District to keep masking in place, granting a preliminary injunction sought by parents of children with disabilities that put them at higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19.

If masks work, why wouldn’t such masks worn by the children with health issues protect them? Why must other people, hundreds of other people, be required to wear masks to protect these three children? Why must the whole school wear masks, rather than only the children and staff in the individual rooms in which the vulnerable students are seated?

It was one line in this article, from National Public Radio — not exactly an evil reich wing site — which puts things in perspective: “eventually, every one of us will get infected.”

    The future of the pandemic is looking clearer as we learn more about infection

    by Michaeleen Doucleff | February 7, 2022 | 5:00 AM ET

    During the early days of the pandemic, scientists and doctors were concerned that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 might not trigger a strong immune response in many people – thus an infection might not provide long-term protection.

    “Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests,” a headline from The Guardian alerted back in July 2020. “King’s College London team found steep drops in patients’ antibody levels three months after infection,” the story warned.

    But that idea was based on preliminary data from the laboratory — and on a faulty understanding of how the immune system works. Now about a year and a half later, better data is painting a more optimistic picture about immunity after a bout of COVID-19. In fact, a symptomatic infection triggers a remarkable immune response in the general population, likely offering protection against severe disease and death for a few years.

    And if you’re vaccinated on top of it, your protection is likely even better, studies are consistently showing.

    Here are several key questions people have been asking throughout the pandemic – and ones that researchers are beginning to answer.

    If I just had COVID, am I protected against getting a severe course of COVID in the future ?

    With SARS-CoV-2, your immune system generates two types of protection: protection against reinfection and protection against severe illness upon that second infection. Let’s start with the latter.

    If you’re under age 50 and healthy, then a bout of COVID-19 offers good protection against severe disease if you were to be infected again in a future surge, says epidemiologist Laith Abu-Raddad, at Weill-Cornell Medical-Qatar. “That’s really important because eventually, every one of us will get infected,” he says. “But if reinfections prove to be more mild, in general, it will allow us to live with this pandemic in a much easier way.”

Also see: William Teach: Surprise: Natural Immunity To COVID Is Rather Real

“Eventually, every one of us will get infected.” Dr abu-Raddad isn’t the only one to tell us this, as Dr Anthony Fauci, the attention whore who has driven so much of US policy, has admitted, as has Dr Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, and others.

With the current Xi Omicron variant generally leading to milder forms of the coronavirus, the obvious question becomes: if everyone will become infected, and infection helps protect people from subsequent infections and disease, isn’t it better to go ahead and get that done now, rather than when a more serious variant emerges?

The three kids in Perkiomen Valley with chronic health problems? Yeah, they’re going to contract the virus, too. Even if a federal judge forces the hundreds of other people in the school to wear masks all day long, they’ll contract the virus anyway, as life continues and the virus evades virtually all measures to stop its spread. It may be more serious for them, it may even be fatal for them, but if everybody is going to be exposed to the virus, they are part of everybody.

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Where is our privacy?

Lexington Herald-Leader health and social services reporter Alex Acquisto wrote, “A little over 55% of the state population is fully vaccinated and 23% of residents have received a booster, according to the Kentucky Department for Public Health.” One wonders: would more Kentuckians consider the vaccines if there were no Kentucky Immunization Registry (KYIR) and the Vaccine Tracking System (VTrckS)? Why must my personal medical information become part of the state’s database?

    Kentucky’s omicron surge is now ‘significantly if not rapidly declining’

    by Alex Acquisto | Monday, February 7, 2022 | 4:59 PM EST | Updated: 5:17 PM EST

    The number of new COVID-19 cases and the statewide rate of people testing positive are now solidly declining in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said on Monday.

    “Cases are significantly if not rapidly declining,” the governor said in a news conference from the Capitol.

    As it has played out in other states, the longevity of the current omicron surge — from beginning, to peak, and now decline — is significantly truncated compared with the delta surge last year, largely because omicron is much more transmissible. It took the delta variant roughly nine weeks to peak at 30,680 cases a week; omicron reached its weekly caseload peak of 81,473 in four weeks.

Further down:

    Hospitalizations, Beshear said, are also showing a “real downward trend,” though the decline is not as sharp as cases. Over the last seven days, coronavirus hospitalizations dropped by 7%, he said, adding that 2,124 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday (down 221 people from Friday), 414 people were in an intensive care unit (40 fewer than a week ago), and 207 are on a ventilator.

    Meanwhile, the number of people seeking vaccinations is “definitely slowing,” Beshear said; at the height of the delta and omicron surges, upwards of 7,000 people would get a dose in any given weekend, and on weekdays, typically more than 3,000 people. Weekends now bring closer to 5,000 people getting doses, and weekdays, 1,000 or less.

There’s more available here.

Kentuckians are independent cusses, and we don’t like people sticking their noses in our business, yet every time the Herald-Leader publishes these stories and shows us these statistics, it tells us what we already really knew: the state government is tracking these things.

The real question is: does the Commonwealth have simply aggregate data, or is the state maintaining information on which specific individuals have been vaccinated?

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And the fearful shall control the rest of us

The American people have become just plain tired of all of the COVID-19 restrictions, and even Democratic Governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware have ended their statewide mask mandates for the schools. Naturally, the petit dictators in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia have not only kept their mask mandates, but even strengthened it:

    Philadelphia students and staff continue to be required to wear masks. On Monday, those rules became stricter — students and employees must now either wear a well-fitted mask (such as a N95, KN94, or KN95) or a three-ply disposable masks. Cloth masks on their own are no longer allowed across the Philadelphia School District.

As we have previously noted, many, and perhaps even most, men now wear beards, and the Centers for Disease Control issued a chart for which facial hair styles will and will not allow an N-95 mask to properly seal! Will Philadelphia now issue facial hair regulations based on the notion that the required masks won’t seal otherwise?

But in the school districts outside of Philadelphia, where local school boards have opted to end the mask mandates, the fearful have gone to court to force those schools to keep them in place:

    Judge orders Perkiomen Valley School District to continue masking to protect disabled students

    The decision is likely to be reviewed by other area school districts revisiting masking requirements as COVID-19 cases decline.

    by Maddie Hanna | Monday, February 7, 2022

    Also see: William Teach: Majority Of Americans Say It’s Time To Accept Chinese Coronavirus And Get On With Our Lives

    A federal judge on Monday ordered the Perkiomen Valley School District to keep masking in place, granting a preliminary injunction sought by parents of children with disabilities that put them at higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19.

    The decision effectively extends a prior order for masking during the school day that Judge Wendy Beetlestone had previously issued against the Montgomery County district, but without any end date.

    In her opinion, Beetlestone agreed with lawyers for the plaintiffs — three children with medical conditions ranging from asthma to chronic bronchitis and pneumonia, that in some cases require taking immunosuppressant drugs — that the children were at heightened risk of severe illness or death if they contracted the virus, and that “universal masking meaningfully reduces the transmission of COVID-19 in schools.” As a result, she said, optional masking prevents the students from “meaningfully accessing” in-person education, a valid claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

There’s more at the original, but if masks work, why wouldn’t such masks worn by the children with health issues protect them? Why must other people, hundreds of other people, be required to wear masks to protect these three children? Why must the whole school wear masks, rather than only the children and staff in the individual rooms in which the vulnerable students are seated?

Of course, the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t apply just to schools; it applies to almost every institution, public and private. Under the rationale of this decision, which does not set a precedent but can be used by other lawyers as evidence in other cases, any fearful Karen in any company can claim highten vulnerability to COVID-19 and try to get a court order requiring the company to maintain a mask mandate. A few thousand Karens across the country, and we could see federal judges basically ordering every workplace and every school and every business to maintain a mask mandate for months or even years. The American people will not stand for that!

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A ‘crime’ created by government I hope that they get away with it!

As we noted on January 30th, two nurses in Amityville, New York were arrested for selling faked COVID-19 vaccination cards. The failure of the government to persuade everybody to take the COVID-19 vaccines voluntarily has led to the coercive measures of vaccine mandates and the wholly repugnant notion of “Ve need to see your papers.” And, just like every other such thing, some people try to get around these things. I only wish that the nurses charged had gotten away with it!

Now comes this story out of the City of Brotherly Love, which has its own vaccine mandates, for many jobs, to dine indoors at a restaurant, and other things. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Police investigating theft of vaccination cards from Penn Medicine clinic in Center City

    The cards and N95 masks were taken from a clinic storage room at 245 S. 8th St., police said.

    by Robert Moran | Thursday, February 3, 2022

    Philadelphia police said Thursday night that they are investigating the theft of COVID-19 vaccination cards and N95 masks from a Penn Medicine clinic in Center City.

    The confirmation of the investigation came after KYW News Radio reported that 5,000 cards had been taken from Pennsylvania Hospital, which is run by Penn Medicine.

    Police, in a summary of the theft report, said the actual number of cards stolen was unknown.

    A spokesperson for Penn Medicine said in a statement: “Safety and security are top priorities in all of our facilities. When this issue was discovered, we promptly reported it to the Philadelphia police and are cooperating fully with the ongoing investigation.”

There’s a bit more at the link. It looks like an inside job, in that there was no sign of forced entry, and all staffers had access to the storage room.

This really can’t be a surprise. As we reported on Thursday, the officious petit dictators who run Philadelphia aren’t planning on dropping COVID-19 restrictions for months, which only creates more incentive for people to want fraudulent vaccination cards. While employers enforcing a vaccine mandate might check the cards more carefully, no one can reasonably expect a hostess at a Philadelphia restaurant trying to enforce the vaccine mandate for indoor dining to give more than a cursory glance at a card someone presents for entry.

How many times have such thefts occurred? In reality, I don’t see the need, because anyone with a good scanner and printer can simply print up the cards himself! He’d need the heavier paper on which they are printed, but that’s readily available at any Office Despot Depot. Counterfeiting these cards is just not that difficult, and actually stealing them from the clinic adds risk to the enterprise.

This is a ‘crime’ created by the government! If it were not for the vaccine mandates, there’d be no need for faked vaccination cards. Given that the vaccines neither prevent infection by the current Xi Omicron variant, nor reduce the transmissibility of the virus from a vaccinated person, the rationale for a vaccine mandate simply does not exist, save in the minds of those who love exercising unbridled power. More, the face masks most people use just don’t stop Omicron, and the so-called experts recommend a N-95 mask, which are only effective if properly fitted, which is impossible for most men who wear beards, meaning that the stupid mask mandates are also unjustifiable.

How many of these faked vaccination cards are out there? We don’t know, but the answer is obviously larger than zero, probably much larger than zero. Some people are going to get caught at this, but I hope that the number who do get caught is very, very low, and the number of people who get away with these forgeries is very, very large. This is not the way I would choose to fight government tyranny — even though vaccinated, I refuse to carry my vaccination card to yield to the officious little pricks demanding, “Papiere, bitte” — but I recognize that, for some people, it’s necessary.

The United States exist because Americans refused to yield to tyranny; that spirit still exists in our great land!

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It doesn’t matter if Omicron is waning: Philadelphia’s tinpot dictators want to keep #COVID19 restrictions in place for months!

The news was certainly appreciated when we learned that Denmark was ending all COVID-19 restrictions:

    Denmark has lifted all Covid-19 restrictions within the country, with coronavirus no longer considered a “socially critical sickness,” according to the government.

    This means that an indoor mask mandate, the use of a “Covid pass” for bars, restaurants and other indoor venues, and the legal obligation to self-isolate if you test positive are all ending.

    “No one can know what will happen next December. But we promised the citizens of Denmark that we will only have restrictions if they are truly necessary and we’ll lift them as soon as we can,” Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke told CNN on Monday. “That’s what’s happening right now.”

    Denmark is the first country in the European Union to lift all restrictions. The move comes at a time when it has the second-highest infection rate, or seven-day average of new infections, of any nation in the world, according to Our World in Data.

There’s more at the original.

Denmark does have a high vaccination rate, 81% being “fully vaccinated,” though the story does not specify what percentage have received the booster. Denmark has no vaccine mandate.

Sadly, here in the United States, supposedly the beacon of freedom in the world, we have too many petit dictators who just love them some authoritarian controls. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Lifting COVID-19 mandates likely still ‘several months away’ in Philadelphia as omicron recedes

    “Our team is actively discussing what an off-ramp looks like,” the city health commissioner said.

    by Justine McDaniel and Erin McCarthy | Groundhog Day, February 2, 2022

    Philadelphia is likely “several months” away from being able to drop its current pandemic restrictions, even as the omicron surge wanes, Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said Wednesday.

    City officials hope to drop the indoor mask mandate eventually, but it’s too early to do so now, Bettigole said at a virtual briefing Wednesday, citing much-improved but still-high case and hospitalization numbers.

    However, officials have begun discussing plans for easing restrictions and providing guidance to residents once the pandemic relents. The city will also consider when to eliminate the vaccine mandate for indoor dining at restaurants, which Bettigole said would not be permanent.

Cheryl Bettigole, from BillyPenn.

At this point in writing an article, I would normally consider adding an illustration, the photo of Cheryl Bettigole, Philadelphia’s Health Commissioner. In previous articles, I used the photo from Dr Bettigole’s Twitter account, but, alas! she went ahead and deleted it. I wonder if perhaps, just perhaps, she was getting too many people calling her a petit dictator. When I found another photo, it let me know one thing: the one she used in her now-defunct Twitter account was definitely a much younger, glammed up photo!

    “Our team is actively discussing what an off-ramp looks like,” Bettigole said when asked about easing restrictions. “If you think about where we are with this particular wave and case rates right now, we’re probably several months away from a place where we will have the kind of safety to drop all the current restrictions.”

    With the surge rapidly declining but transmission levels still categorized as high, public health officials nationwide are urging continued caution for now — while saying optimism is warranted as the spring looks likely to bring at least a period of relief.

A period of relief? What they are saying is simple: at least for the Xi Omicron variant, COVID-19 is a seasonal disease, like influenza.

    In New Jersey, the rate of COVID-19 transmission is the lowest it has been in several weeks, Gov. Phil Murphy said.

    “Trends that we are seeing across literally all metrics continue to suggest the omicron tsunami, as fast as it washed in, is washing out at nearly the same speed,” the governor said. Still, “we have to remain on a vigilant footing.”

    The average daily new case count has dropped 70% in New Jersey and 57% in Pennsylvania over the last two weeks, according to federal data analyzed by the New York Times. Still, more than 10,000 new cases are being reported each day in Pennsylvania and more than 5,000 in New Jersey.

Vaccinations remain slow, for a simple reason: the people who wanted to take the vaccines had already done so, and the people who resisted have mostly still resisted; only dictatorial action, mandating vaccination, with the cost of non-compliance being job loss or being unable to participate in society, has pushed some of the reluctant to take the vaccines.[1]Yes, I am fully vaccinated, and boostered, but that was my choice, and I absolutely refuse to carry my vaccination card with me, to yield to the officious little pricks demanding, “Papiere, … Continue reading And we already know: the vaccines do not stop the spread of the Omicron variant, and they do not reduce the transmissibility of Omicron from vaccinated people. More, the face masks most people use just don’t stop Omicron, and the so-called experts recommend a N-95 mask.

Click to enlarge.

Of course, many, and perhaps even most, men now wear beards, and the Centers for Disease Control issued a chart for which facial hair styles will and will not allow an N-95 mask to properly seal! I shall admit to previous ignorance of the names attached to various styles of beards.

With my full beard, an N-95 would not work for me, so I have to ask: would Dr Bettigole and the rest of the tinpot dictators in the City of Brotherly Love try to require men to shave off their beards to wear properly the recommended N-95 mask? That would seem silly, but I put nothing beyond these drunk-with-power bureaucrats.

Fortunately, I no longer live in the Keystone State, but I am constantly amazed at the number of people yielding to dictatorship, who give up some of their essential liberty to purchase a bit of temporary safety.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I am fully vaccinated, and boostered, but that was my choice, and I absolutely refuse to carry my vaccination card with me, to yield to the officious little pricks demanding, “Papiere, bitte.”
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This is hardly a surprise: #VaccineMandates lead to people trying to get around them

The failure of the government to persuade everybody to take the COVID-19 vaccines has led to the coercive measures of vaccine mandates and the wholly repugnant notion of “Ve need to see your papers.” And, just like every other such thing, some people try to get around these things. I only wish that these two had gotten away with this!

    Two New York nurses charged with making $1.5 million off fake vaccination cards

    Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said the nurses charged $220 for adults and $85 for children.

    by The Associated Press | Saturday, January 29, 2022

    AMITYVILLE, N.Y. — Two nurses on Long Island are accused of forging COVID-19 vaccination cards and pocketing more than $1.5 million from the scheme, prosecutors and police said.

    Julie DeVuono, the owner of Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare in Amityville, and her employee, Marissa Urraro, are both charged with felony forgery, and DeVuono also is charged with offering a false instrument for filing. Both were arraigned Friday.

Further down:

    Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said DeVuono and Urraro handed out fake vaccination cards, charging $220 for adults and $85 for children. DeVuono, a nurse practitioner, and Urraro, a licensed practical nurse, entered the false information into the state’s immunization database, he said.

    Prosecutors said the nurses forged a fake card showing a vaccine was given to an undercover detective but never administered the vaccine to the detective.

There’s more at the original.

It’s simple: the government, including New York City, New York state, and the Biden Administration, pushed mandates which required people to get vaccinations and show proof to keep their jobs or go into some public facilities. They weren’t the only ones, as many places run by Democrats, including the city of Philadelphia, have done the same. I can only be thankful that the Kentucky General Assembly stripped Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) of any authority to do the same, or he’d have tried it locally.

Obviously there were suspicions about this, given that the Staatspolizei sent an undercover detective. I can only hope that there are more, many more, people engaged in the same enterprise who have not been detected, who are getting away with it.

The vaccines are a good thing, and I think everyone who is eligible should take them. But forcing people to take them is a wholly bad, unwarranted, and unconstitutional infringement on our individual liberties.

The nurses allegedly “entered the false information into the state’s immunization database,” the story reported. The first problem is that there even is a state immunization database, that the state is keeping track of people’s private medical records.

The second is that you just know that the Staatspolizei will be going through that database, pulling out the records of everyone who is noted as having receive the vaccine from the two suspects, and then chasing them down, to see who scammed the system. It’s very probable that the Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare clinic did administer the vaccines in cases where people wanted them, and those who were actually vaccinated will be considered suspects as well. There is at least one blood test which can detect if someone has the COVID antibodies the vaccines are supposed to generate, but, since the vaccines lose effectiveness after several months, it is entirely possible that someone who was legitimately vaccinated several months ago might test negative for the antibodies, and that could lead to people who were legitimately being vaccinated nevertheless being charged with some sort of fraud if the Reichssicherheitshauptamt decides to go after the people who got faked cards.

If there’s a legal defense fund for these two nurses, I shall contribute to it!