I noted yesterday, in a comment on The Pirate’s Cove, that The New York Times, not exactly an evil reich-wing source, that Denmark and Norway have reported that the positivity rate in testing for the Xi Omicron variant is virtually the same as the percentage of the population which are fully vaccinated. Statistically speaking, full vaccination status appears to convey close to zero resistance to contracting the Omicron variant:
Denmark and Norway Predict Drastic Spike in Omicron Cases
Health authorities in Europe are warning of a sharp increase in Omicron cases, adding to an existing surge from the Delta variant.
By Carl Zimmer and Emily Anthes | December 13, 2021
Public health authorities in Denmark and Norway on Monday released grim projections for the coming wave of the Omicron coronavirus variant, predicting that it will dominate both countries in a matter of days. Although scientists don’t yet know how often the variant causes severe disease, they say its rapid rate of spread will lead to an explosion of cases and could potentially increase pressure on hospitals, even if it proves to be mild.
The reports follow similarly worrisome findings from England released over the weekend, although researchers caution that the trend could change as the variant comes into clearer view. It’s not yet certain how often Omicron infections will send people to the hospital, or how many hospitalized patients are likely to die. And while Omicron can partly evade immune defenses, researchers have yet to determine how well vaccinations and previous infections will protect people against severe disease.
The authors of both new reports also observed that swift actions now, such as booster campaigns and reducing opportunities for Omicron to spread, could lessen the variant’s impact.
American researchers have yet to release models of Omicron’s rise in the United States. But experts point out that the country is similar to Norway and Denmark in terms of vaccination levels and certain Covid risk factors, like the average age of the population.
Further down:
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In the report released on Monday by the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, researchers estimated that Omicron cases in Denmark were doubling every two days. Omicron is spreading much faster than Delta, which means that the new variant will become dominant by midweek, the report found.
Three-quarters of the Omicron cases are in people who have received two vaccine doses, which is about the same fraction of the entire country that’s fully vaccinated. That high percentage indicates that vaccines are providing little protection from infection, though most scientists believe that the shots will still fend off severe disease and death.
The Danish data are consistent with a smaller report of Omicron infections in the United States. Out of 43 documented cases, 34 — or about 79 percent — were people who were fully vaccinated.
“This thing can spread, and it can spread whether or not you were vaccinated,” Christina Ramirez, a biostatistician at the University of California, Los Angeles, said.
In England, researchers also found that full vaccination provided low protection against a breakthrough infection. But they found that booster shots restored defenses to much higher levels.
There’s more at the original. Now comes The Washington Post:
- Governments will try to impose further indoor mask mandates;
- Governments will try to ‘persuade’ people not to have family gatherings this Christmas;
- Governments will push further vaccine mandates for employers;
- Governments will push further vaccine ‘passports’ to shop, dine, or participate in other indoor events; and
- Governments will try to change the definition of “fully vaccinated” to having also received the booster.
- Powell County: The median income for a household in the county was $25,515, and the median income for a family was $30,483. Males had a median income of $26,962 versus $18,810 for females. The per capita income for the county was $13,060. About 18.90% of families and 23.50% of the population were below the poverty line, including 31.00% of those under age 18 and 20.00% of those age 65 or over.
- Wolfe County: The median income for a household in the county was $19,310, and the median income for a family was $23,333. Males had a median income of $23,859 versus $18,952 for females. The per capita income for the county was $10,321. About 29.90% of families and 35.90% of the population were below the poverty line, including 50.20% of those under age 18 and 26.70% of those age 65 or over.
Omicron spreading rapidly in U.S. and could bring punishing wave as soon as January, CDC warns
But federal and some pharmaceutical executives signal they do not currently favor revising vaccines, saying existing regimen plus boosters are effective
Top federal health officials warned in a briefing Tuesday morning that the omicron variant is rapidly spreading in the United States and could peak in a massive wave of infections as soon as January, according to new modeling analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The prevalence of omicron jumped sevenfold in a single week, according to the CDC, and at such a pace, the highly mutated variant of the coronavirus could ratchet up pressure on a health system already strained in many places as the delta variant continues its own surge.
The warning of an imminent surge came even as federal officials and some pharmaceutical executives signaled that they don’t currently favor creating an omicron-specific vaccine. Based on the data so far, they say that existing vaccines plus a booster shot are an effective weapon against omicron.
The CDC briefing Tuesday detailed two scenarios for how the omicron variant may spread through the country. The worst-case scenario has spooked top health officials, who fear that a fresh wave, layered on top of delta and influenza cases in what one described as “a triple whammy,” could overwhelm health systems and devastate communities, particularly those with low vaccination rates.
“I’m a lot more alarmed. I’m worried,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, who participated in the call. The CDC, normally cautious in its messaging, told the public health officials that “we got to get people ready for this,” he said.
He noted that the omicron surge, if it materializes as forecast, would be taking place as delta continues its onslaught and during the time of year when influenza cases often peak.
Not noted here is that flu season was mostly skipped last winter, attributed to the coronavirus restrictions.
- Officials stress that early data shows that individuals who are fully vaccinated and received a booster shot remain largely protected against severe illness and death from omicron. But they worry about how few Americans have been boosted to date. Over 55 million people in the United States have gotten the additional shots, out of 200 million who are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
There’s more at the original, but you can count on several things:
Israel has already required that booster to be considered fully vaccinated.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to note that if there was an actual conspiracy to more greatly subjugate the population to greater government control, the conspirators wouldn’t do much differently than is already being done.
The vaccines weren’t doing that great a job in preventing COVID-19 infections, though they did seem to reduce the seriousness of associated illnesses. Now they seem to be doing nothing to stop the Xi Omicron variant from infecting people, and it may be that Omicron may be less virulent anyway.
My whole family have taken the vaccines, and my wife — who is a hospital RN — and I have taken the boosters as well. To us, that’s a wise decision. But my thinking that it’s a wise decision does not mean that I in any way approve of mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports; preventative measures should be voluntary, up to individuals, and not the government. ‘It’s for our own good’ is not, and never has been, a reason for people to surrender their rights.
The left have internalized the ‘new normal’
As most people just want to get over COVID-19 and the ridiculous restrictions under which governments have put people, some have so internalized the messages of fear that they’ll never get over it.
The image to the right is a screenshot of a tweet by blue-checked Nicole F Carr. You can click on either the link in the previous sentence, or the image itself, to get to the original.
The obvious answer to her question is: producers want to be able to show their Christmas movies in more than just this year, and Christmas movies aren’t supposed to be downers. They’d like to show this in 2022, 2023, and so on.
But Mrs Carr, whose Twitter biography states that she’s “@ProPublica South covering criminal justice,racial inequity,COVID. @Morehouse journalism professor. 4x Emmy, #WSSU #Newhouse nicole.carr@propublica.org”, is obviously heavily invested in reporting on the virus.
Well, perhaps Mrs Carr really does believe that we’ll all be wearing masks for the rest of our lives, but let’s face facts: mask mandates are being honored in the breach almost every place they can be.
- Christmas movies aren’t meant just for one year; the producers want to be able to use it again in 2022, 2023, and so on. And let’s face it: Christmas movies aren’t supposed to be downers, and the restrictions are real buzzkills.
We’d like to get back to our normal lives.
Well, while it’s still there, apparently Mrs Carr didn’t like it, because now there’s this, which wasn’t there previously:
Like so many other lefties on Twitter, Mrs Carr can dish it out, but she just can’t take criticism! I am not surprised.
A few news items about excess government power
Lexington Catholic High School will drop its mandatory mask mandate:
- Beginning January 10, 2022, Lexington Catholic High School will switch to a mask “optional” COVID policy for all students and staff, principal Matthew George told families in a letter this week.
“Lexington Catholic will closely monitor the health and safety of everyone in our building and throughout our community. Optional masking may be suspended at any time if the need arises and return to mandatory masking,” George said.
For the short term, Catholic Diocese of Lexington Bishop John Stowe has extended the mask mandate through January 7, 2022.
This story was published on Friday, November 26th, so with the new panic over the Omicron variant, who knows if the mask mandate will actually be lifted. Even if the principal decides that it should, Bishop John Stowe could, and my guess is probably would, override it. There is no statewide mask mandate in Kentucky, because the General Assembly greatly restricted the Governor’s ’emergency’ authority under KRS 39A.
Judge in Ky. blocks federal contractor vaccine mandate, granting AG Cameron’s request
By Austin Horn | Tuesday, November 30, 2021 | 3:42 PM EST | Updated: 5:31 PM EST
A federal judge in Kentucky issued a preliminary injunction effectively blocking implementation of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal government contractors and subcontractors on Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove, who serves the Eastern District of Kentucky, issued the opinion and order Tuesday afternoon. It came in response to a challenge from Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who joined many other state attorneys general in challenging the mandate.
“This is not a case about whether vaccines are effective. They are,” Van Tatenhove wrote. “Nor is this a case about whether the government, at some level, and in some circumstances, can require citizens to obtain vaccines. It can.”
There’s more at the original. Judge Tatenhove’s ruling was on very narrow grounds, that the vaccine orders were not properly issued:
- One key argument of the U.S. government that received some pushback was President Biden’s use of a procurement statute to justify the mandate for contractors and subcontractors. Van Tatenhove wrote that “even for a good cause” like limiting the spread of COVID-19, Biden could not go beyond his congressionally delegated authority in implementing the statute.
“It strains credulity that Congress intended… a procurement statute to be the basis for promulgating a public health measure such as mandatory vaccination,” Van Tatenhove wrote. “If a vaccination mandate has a close enough nexus to economy and efficiency in federal procurement, then the statute could be used to enact virtually any measure at the president’s whim under the guise of economy and efficiency.”
Sadly, things are worse in the Keystone State:
Pennsylvania’s school-mask mandate will stay in place for now, state Supreme Court says
The court granted a request from Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration to keep the mandate in place while it appeals a lower court ruling striking down the requirement.
by Maddie Hanna | Tuesday, November 30, 2021
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said Tuesday that the state’s school-mask mandate can remain in place at least for the next week while Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration appeals a lower-court ruling striking down the requirement.
The order followed a request from Wolf’s administration to keep the mandate in place while it appeals the Commonwealth Court ruling that faulted the state Health Department for how it imposed the requirement.
Siding with Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman (R., Centre) and other parents, the Commonwealth Court said Nov. 10 that acting Health Secretary Alison Beam had overstepped her authority in ordering masking at the start of the school year by failing to follow the state’s procedures for implementing new regulations. The court later set Dec. 4 as the day for the mandate to be lifted, an action sought by Corman.
The state’s highest court said the mandate could stay in effect pending consideration of the appeal, which is scheduled for oral arguments Dec. 8. “Nothing in this order shall be construed as a position regarding the merits of this appeal,” the court said.
Had the mandate expired Saturday, school districts would have faced the decision of whether to require masking. Some, including Philadelphia, have indicated no immediate plans to lift masking, though mandates have remained a fraught topic in a number of area communities.
Wolf said earlier this month that he expected to lift the state mandate Jan. 17. That announcement came prior to the Commonwealth Court ruling.
One of us is absolutely certain that Governor Wolf would have found some reason not to lift the order on schedule. Let’s face it: Democratic politicians just love to order people around!
#MaskMandates and fewer fans in the stands Maybe if the Lexington Herald-Leader told the unshaded truth, the newspaper would have more subscribers
If there is one thing that keeps the Lexington Herald-Leader in business, it is the newspaper’s reporting on University of Kentucky sports. In our poor state, UK’s men’s basketball team has been a source of pride for decades, winning eight NCAA championships, the first in 1948. Rupp Arena, where the Wildcats play, was once the nation’s largest basketball venue.
Crowds were extremely limited last season, due to COVID-19 restrictions, and the team had an unexpectedly poor season. This year, with some veteran players returning, along with some experienced transfers and top freshmen, much is expected of the Wildcats.
The Herald-Leader has now noted that attendance has been unexpectedly low:
Empty seats in Rupp Arena are sending UK a message. Is anyone listening?
by Mark Story | November 15, 2021 | 4:14 PM EST
One of the pressing questions this year as America’s mass-spectator sports moved out of 2020’s pandemic-inspired attendance restrictions is whether the crowds were going to come back en masse to the ballgames?
Locally, University of Kentucky football fans have answered with an emphatic yes.
In the 61,000-seat Kroger Field, UK sold out three of its four home Southeastern Conference games this fall — Florida (announced attendance of 61,632), LSU (61,690), Tennessee (61,690) — and just missed on its fourth vs. Missouri (58,537).
Skipping further down was the impetus for the story:
- While the sample size is small, attendance has so far this season been soft for UK basketball games in Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center.
For the Wildcats’ 2021-22 exhibition opener against Kentucky Wesleyan, the announced attendance in Rupp — the number of tickets distributed to the event — was 17,133 in the 20,545-seat venue.
The figure for the second exhibition, against Miles College, was 17,814.
You can follow the link to read the rest for yourself.
Mark Story, one of the newspaper’s sportswriters, suggested that part of the reason was worry over the COVID-19 panicdemic. But, in the end, he said that it was his guess that paying customers were disappointed in the cupcakes UK was playing in the early part of the season, and that we’d see something different when the hated University of Louisville Cardinals come to town on December 22nd.
But it was this photo, accompanying the article, which caught my attention. If I counted correctly, there are 38 fans depicted whose faces can be seen clearly, and only 17 cam be seen wearing face masks correctly. Several others can be seen with masks below noses, below chins, at least one with a mask hanging down from one ear, and others with no masks visible at all. Yet UK mandates the wearing of facemasks at all indoor sporting events:
- Among the policies, fans will be required to wear a face mask as they watch the game and move around Rupp Arena, regardless of vaccination status. The policy also applies to staff and vendors.
Kentuckians just don’t like those masks!
Mr Story’s story? While he mentioned the COVID-19 panicdemic possibly having something to do with lowered attendance, he never wrote the first word about the mask mandate potentially contributing to fewer fans in the stands.
This is just poor journalism, or typical journolism,[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading from the Herald-Leader. To have mentioned that the mask mandate might have possibly caused lower attendance would have wholly violated the paper’s editorial stand in favor of masks. Whether Mr Story actually mentioned it, and an editor removed it, or he simply ignored it due to what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal’s editorial stand, I do not know, but the newspaper is not telling the whole truth to its readers.
Media bias does not normally come in the form of outright lies to readers. Rather, it is far more likely to come from the choices of what facts to report, and what facts to conceal. In this case, the Herald-Leader omitted a major potential cause in reduced attendance, when that major potential cause contradicted its editorial stance. Perhaps Mr Story sneaked that in, with the photo chosen to illustrate the article, but no mention of the mask mandate was made in the story; the source I used to note the mandate came from WLEX-TV.
Newspapers are suffering from reduced readership all across the country; maybe if they told readers the unvarnished truth, they’d have more subscribers.
References
| ↑1 | The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. |
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CDC doctor says that achieving ‘herd immunity’ is unlikely even with universal vaccination
The vaccinated Joel Embiid is out for the 76ers due to a positive test. Quarterback Ben Roethlisburger, who is fully vaccinated, is out today for the Pittsburgh Steelers due to COVID-19. Yet somehow, while everyone is trashing Aaron Rodgers, no one seems to note that fully vaccinated players are also testing positive. Now, the CDC are saying that ‘herd immunity’ is not an achievable goal:
The prospects for meeting a clear herd-immunity target are “very complicated,” said Dr Jefferson Jones, a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force.
“Thinking that we’ll be able to achieve some kind of threshold where there’ll be no more transmission of infections may not be possible,” Jones acknowledged last week to members of a panel that advises the CDC on vaccines.
Vaccines have been quite effective at preventing cases of COVID-19 that lead to severe illness and death, but none has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus, Jones noted. Recent evidence has also made clear that the immunity provided by vaccines can wane in a matter of months.
The result is that even if vaccination were universal, the coronavirus would probably continue to spread.
“We would discourage” thinking in terms of “a strict goal,” he said.
If such is the case, vaccination appears to be personally useful, but its societal usage is questionable. If none have proven “reliable at blocking transmission of the virus,” what is the justification for compelling vaccination? At this point, choosing not to get vaccinated puts an individual at greater danger, but it’s a danger for himself, without being a proven greater danger to others.
Fear is the mind-killer!
William Teach noted New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s paean to fear:
- When you see how hard it’s been for governments to get their citizens to just put on a mask in stores, or to get vaccinated, to protect themselves, their neighbors and their grandparents from being harmed or killed by Covid-19, how in the world are we going to get big majorities to work together globally and make the lifestyle sacrifices needed to dampen the increasingly destructive effects of global warming — for which there are treatments but no vaccine?
Perhaps, just perhaps, when the plebeians see the patricians taking 118 private jets to the ‘climate summit’ COP26, they simply aren’t convinced that global warming climate change emergency is all that much of an emergency. Whether Mr Friedman took a private jet or, gasp!, flew commercial I do not know, but we do know that he’s been flying all over the globe to attend these things, telling us that he has “been to most of the climate summits since Bali in 2007”.
Yeah, if I could get the Times to pay for a vacation in Bali, I’d go, too!
But Mr Friedman hit upon the instrument of control the government, at all levels, have been trying to use: fear! When he complains that some people are not cooperating with the message that COVID-19 could harm or kill people’s grandparents, neighbors, and themselves, he frets that people, free people, are just not going to go along with the “lifestyle sacrifices” the patricians demand of others, though seemingly not of themselves.
But he needn’t worry: there have been plenty of people who were filled with fear, and are still filled with fear. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
The catharsis of attending my first concert of the COVID-19 era | Opinion
I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world.
by Rachel Kramer Bussel, For The Inquirer | November 5, 2021
“Is this your first time?” a stranger asked me in an elevator at the Met as we tried to find our seats at the St. Vincent concert a few weeks ago.
Stunned, I stared back at her, trying to form an answer. How did she know? Did I look stricken by the nerves I’d felt bouncing around for weeks as I tried to decide if attending a public event was finally safe? I eventually nodded.
“You have two masks, just like me. It’s my first too,” she said. We both knew she meant it wasn’t our first concert ever, but our first pandemic outing.
I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world. For the last few months, we’d been going to a local grocery store to supplement our Instacart deliveries, but beyond that and work interactions, we hadn’t been close to such a large group of people since before the mid-March 2020 lockdown.
There’s a sadness in that: Miss Bussel has just told us that her boyfriend and she had virtually shut down their social lives for nineteen months. For the “last few months” they’d worked up the nerve to venture out to go to the grocery store, apparently when they’d missed putting something on their Instacart order. Of course, they were willing to put other people at whatever risk they were afraid to take themselves, because Instacart requires living human beings to put together the grocery order, and living human beings to drive through Egg Harbor Township[1]Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’ to deliver the orders. The stressful social situations Her boyfriend and Miss Bussel avoided themselves they thought little of putting on other people.
- I was expecting to enjoy hearing St. Vincent perform for the first time, but I wasn’t prepared for the sense of catharsis the communal experience would be. I looked around at my fellow concertgoers, at the dazzling chandelier, at the dancers and musicians onstage, and felt deeply grateful that I’d said yes to attending. In August, I’d reluctantly had my boyfriend sell our long-awaited tickets to see Sleater-Kinney and Wilco at the Mann Center, even though that was an outdoor show. The risks felt too great.
But having received my Pfizer booster shot two days before the St. Vincent show, and knowing the Met requires a COVID-19 vaccination or a recent negative test, I felt that was a risk worth taking.
Uhhh, if Miss Bussel got her COVID-19 booster shot two days prior to attending the concert, it hadn’t had time to work yet![2]“At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to … Continue reading
Of course, she was reassured by the fact that other concert goers had to show their papers! Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen![3]Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ … Continue reading
The author continued to tell us how she is now facing decisions about what her boyfriend and she can and cannot, should or should not, do to return to a normal life, but I have to wonder: after nineteen months of seemingly abject fear, is it reasonable to think she ever can just turn it off? The ‘experts’ are now telling us that SARS-CoV-2 will be with us forever, though it will become endemic and not be classified as a panicdemic pandemic. Miss Bussel revealed that she has asthma, which could mean that, if she became infected, the disease could be worse for her. Nevertheless, at least to judge from the photo she supplied to the Inquirer, as well as on her website, she’s a fairly young woman, and younger people, while still susceptible, tend to have far less serious outcomes.
Life is full of risks, and COVID-19 is but one of them. Miss Bussel was in about as much danger driving to that concert from a traffic accident as she was of contracting the virus. And since we know that even those who have been vaccinated can contract and spread the virus, going to that concert did not reduce her risk of contracting the virus to zero.
What government, governments at all levels, have done, is to spread fear through our society, fear of contracting a disease which can be deadly, and is deadly in a small percentage of cases, to the extent that it has crippled our society. The American Automobile Association has reported that Thanksgiving travel plans appear to be near pre-pandemic levels, despite Joe Biden’s soaring gasoline prices, but that simply tells us just how much restrictions and fear disrupted Americans’ lives in 2020. Many Governor’s, including Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, issued orders restricting how many people, and from how many households, people could have in their own homes for Thanksgiving last year, orders that I am proud to say the Pico family ignored. For government to have tried to virtually cancel Thanksgiving is something that only induced fear could accomplish.
We must not fear! As Frank Herbert wrote, fear is the mind-killer, but fear is also the freedom killer, the liberty killer! We allowed fear to get people to obey unconstitutional orders from state governors, orders restricting our freedom of religion and freedom of peaceable assembly. When we let fear get us to go along meekly with government diktats that infringe on our individual rights, we enable governments to keep doing so. They only need to instill the next subject of terror and fear to be able to do so.
References
| ↑1 | Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’ |
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| ↑2 | “At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to 12.3), for an absolute difference of 86.6 infections per 100,000 person-days.” |
| ↑3 | Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ Day, but the county health department would have been closed for the holiday, so I got it on the 9th. It was my choice — well, actually, my wife, a hospital nurse, asked me to do so, because she says she puts me at risk, since she treats COVID patients — but I absotively, posilutely refuse to carry around the vaccination records. I will not comply with “Ve need to see your papers!” |
Governor Tom Wolf dances to avoid a court ruling He's going to end mask mandate in January, hoping to get the lawsuits against the state dismissed as moot.
Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) will, thankfully, be gone in a year, but he’s anxious to protect what executive authority he can while he remains in office.
As the Delta variant spread, Governor Wolf initially stated that he would leave mask mandate decisions up to local school boards. Then, when many of those school boards didn’t decide the way he wanted them to decide, the Governor got acting Secretary of Health Allison Beam to issue a public health order requiring masks indoors in the Commonwealth’s schools, public and private alike, as well as early learning and child-care facilities.
We noted, last June, that the Governor scheduled an end to the state’s mask mandate just a day after the state legislature slapped him down over it. Now, he’s doing it again!
Pa. mask mandate for public and private schools expected to end in January, Wolf says
Gov. Tom Wolf’s update to the school mask mandate comes as vaccinations have expanded to children ages 5-11. The mandate will remain in early learning and child care centers.
by Jamie Martines | Monday, November 8, 2021
HARRISBURG — A statewide order mandating students, staff, and visitors to public and private K-12 schools to wear a mask while indoors is expected to be lifted Jan. 17, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Monday.
At that point, local school officials will be allowed to decide what mitigation efforts to implement.
Part of the order that applies to early learning programs and child care centers will remain in effect until further notice, Wolf said in a statement. . . . .
“Now, we are in a different place than we were in September, and it is time to prepare for a transition back to a more normal setting,” Wolf said in a statement Monday. “Unfortunately, the COVID-19 virus is now a part of our daily lives, but with the knowledge we’ve gained over the past 20 months and critical tools like the vaccine at our disposal, we must take the next step forward in our recovery.”
There’s more at the original, but part of the answer is clear: the masking order has been challenged in court, and if the order is ended on January 17th, just 2¼ months from now, given the long delays in the court system, the lawsuits can be dismissed as moot, because the order will have ended. That would leave the method used by the Governor and his minions in place, in case they wanted to use it again.
The plaintiff’s attorney has stated that the lawsuits will proceed anyway, because the order will be kept in place for younger children and day care facilities, and that not challenging the order in court leaves the mechanism available if the Governor wants to use it again.
We had noted the vast assumption of power by the petty dictators in the executive branch. Then-Secretary of Health Richard Levine[1]Dr Levine is a male who is so delusional that he thinks he is female, and goes by the name ‘Rachel.’ In their continuing mission to normalize transgenderism, the credentialed media always refer … Continue reading even ordered Pennsylvanians to wear masks in their own homes, if they had non-household members present.
Of course, the mask mandate might not end in Philadelphia, because Mayor Jim Kenney and acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole just love to exercise authoritarian power.
References
| ↑1 | Dr Levine is a male who is so delusional that he thinks he is female, and goes by the name ‘Rachel.’ In their continuing mission to normalize transgenderism, the credentialed media always refer to him as ‘Rachel,’ and no longer note that he is ‘transgender. The First Street Journal, in accordance with its Stylebook, does not go along with such stupidity, and always refers to people by their biological sex and proper name. |
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Governor Andy Beshear hurts the poor in Kentucky
Steve Beshear, the former Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, has a guesstimated net worth of $1.5 million. Mr Beshear spent almost his entire adult life in politics, and:
is an American attorney and politician who served as the 61st governor of Kentucky from 2007 to 2015. He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives from 1974 to 1980, was the state’s 44th attorney general from 1980 to 1983, and was the 49th lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1987.
He ‘suffered’ through an interregnum when he finished third in the Democratic primary for Governor, and he spent twenty years practicing law with Lexington’s prestigious firm of Stites and Harbison. Briefly put, Mr Beshear led a reasonably privileged lifestyle in the Bluegrass State’s second largest city.
The former Governor’s son, Andy Beshear, wound up leading a similarly privileged lifestyle, able to attend Vanderbilt University, the only private school in the Southeastern Conference, current estimated cost of attendance $80,546 per academic year, and then the University of Virginia School of Law, current estimated cost of attendance for out-of-state students $91,704 per academic year.
In 2005, he was also hired by Stites and Harbison. No ambulance-chasing for the younger Me Beshear.
The younger Mr Beshear was elected state Attorney General in 2015, and subsequently Governor in 2019.
When the COVID-19 pandemic, or panicdemic as I sometimes call it, arose in early 2020, Governor Beshear issued draconian executive orders which shut down much of the ‘non-essential’ businesses in the Bluegrass State. Fifteen days to flatten the infection curve, we were told!
View from Natural Bridge, October 23, 2021. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.
Fast forward to this autumn. The Pico family visited Natural Bridge State Park on Saturday, October 23rd. It wasn’t a long visit, in that we didn’t have much time, so we took the skylift to the top of the bridge, from which I took the photograph.[1]Photos copyright by Dana R Pico. May be freely used with proper attribution.
When one of my Twitter friends replied, “I am surprised more leaves haven’t turned yet!” I resolved to return in two weeks to repeat the photo. So, we returned on Sunday, November 7th, and I got the photo, which will appear further down.
We had more time on Sunday, so while we took the skylift up, we decided to hike down Balanced Rock Trail, which ends not at the bottom of the skylift, but at Hemlock Lodge, the park’s hotel, gift shop and dining room facility.
Signs on the doors to Hemlock Lodge. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.
And Hemlock Lodge is where we found these signs on the doors, requiring masks for entry. Well, we didn’t have masks with us, and entered anyway, quickly discovering that the signs were mostly honored in the breach by park visitors, though employees did wear the infernal things.
What we also found was that the once-thriving restaurant was closed to dining! There were two ladies working therein, who would get carry-out orders. I asked them why the place was closed, and was told that the facility had been shut down due to COVID-19, and that was in March of 2020. Most of the staff had been laid off, and now, twenty months later, they still were not back.
Natural Bridge State Park is located in the Red River Gorge geological area, and straddles Powell and Wolfe counties in Kentucky. These are two very poor counties:
As much as people hear about jobs going begging for people, much of that is in suburban and urban areas; rural eastern Kentucky is not like that. When Governor Beshear — a Democrat, of course — shut down so much of the state parks, he put people out of work that had fewer prospects for finding something else.
View from Natural Bridge, November 7, 2021. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.
For restaurant workers? There’s Miguel’s Pizza, right across State Route 11 from the entrance to the state park, but it offers lower wages and doesn’t have state employee benefits. Governor Beshear, reared in wealthier Lexington, the scion of a prominent family, doesn’t really understand what he has done to rural Kentuckians, or, if he does understand, he doesn’t really care.
This has been the problem with the Patricians all along: they are so wrapped up in their own little worlds that they have lost any concept of what it is like for the plebeians. For the well-to-do, well, heck, two weeks to flatten the curve was nothing, they could handle it!
But for the working class, two weeks without their jobs isn’t nothing; it’s two weeks without bills getting paid. Governor Beshear doesn’t understand that, and doesn’t want to understand that.
References
| ↑1 | Photos copyright by Dana R Pico. May be freely used with proper attribution. |
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Mask mandate fights in Pennsylvania
If you sent your kids to a private school, the private school decided that face masks would be optional, and you disagreed with that decision, wouldn’t you stop paying tuition and send your kids to public schools, where they had a mask mandate?
A Northeast Philly private school defied the city’s mask order. Philadelphia took it to court.
Calvary Christian Academy did not require masking, enable social distancing, or require those exposed to COVID-19 to quarantine, the city said in court filings.
by Kristen A Graham | Tuesday, November 2, 2021
For nearly two months, a Northeast Philadelphia religious school flouted the city’s mandatory masking order.
And though staff and children are now wearing masks after the city asked a judge for an emergency injunction, leaders of the church that runs Calvary Christian Academy have vowed to fight for the right to keep masks optional.
It’s another salvo in an increasingly bitter political battle over mask-wearing in Pennsylvania and schools across the country.
Since the beginning of the school year, CCA, a prekindergarten-through-12th-grade school on Philmont Avenue in the city’s Somerton section, “did not require masking, did not enable social distancing among the students, and did not require members of the school exposed to COVID-19 to quarantine,” according to court documents.
Though both Philadelphia and Pennsylvania issued mandatory masking orders this summer amid the continuing pandemic and rising case counts, CCA told parents in a Sept. 6 letter that despite government orders, “we will keep the current COVID protocol in place, which states that masks are optional.”
Some parents complained about CCA’s mask-optional policy at the beginning of the school year. Separately, the school came to the attention of health department workers monitoring COVID-19 containment through a number of cases reported at the school — 23 between Sept. 7 and Oct. 5.
Calvary Christian Academy is not the most expensive private school out there, but it isn’t exactly cheap, either. Tuition is $4,450 for Calvary Church members, and $5,850 for non-members,[1]It’s quite common for parochial schools to have lower tuition rates for parishioners, and parishioners are expected to make contributions to the church. in the elementary school, $4,950/$6,350 for the junior high, $5,450/$6,900 for grades 9-11, and $5,850/$7,300 for seniors. If you were a Calvary parent, and disapproved of the optional mask policy, you could save a bunch of money by using the public schools.
Of course, for Calvary parents, that would mean sending their kids to the city’s disastrous public school system.
CCA staff told a city worker in late September they believed the school did not need to observe health department regulations because “CCA was a private religious school,” court filings show. The school also failed to submit to the city information about close contacts of CCA staff and students who tested positive for COVID-19.
Naturally, the city fought, and on Friday, October 29th, Common Pleas Court Judge Joshua Roberts signed an order requiring all personnel, students as well as staff, to wear masks. The school will reluctantly comply, while continuing the legal battle to overturn the judge’s order.
But, as the Inquirer reported on Thursday, October 28th, the mask mandate isn’t being strictly enforced in some public schools.
Sometimes when Lily Beard is running late for her second-period class, the only open seat is in front of a group of boys who don’t wear masks.
“They’re always coughing and being disgusting behind me,” said Lily, a ninth grader at Council Rock South High School, where, she said, it seems as if half the kids aren’t wearing masks.
“It’s completely unfair that we can’t go to school and learn and be safe.”
Then, don’t run late!
Of course, young Miss Beard is, one supposes, fully vaccinated, and the photo accompanying the article showed her mother and her wearing black, commercially-made masks. If the vaccines are supposed to protect the vaccinated, and masks protect the mask wearers, shouldn’t that be enough for the fearful?
Miss Beard complained that only about half of the students were wearing masks regularly, which tell you one thing: they don’t want to wear masks, and there’s no reason why their rights not to wear a mask should somehow be trumped by Miss Beard’s claim that they should.
Then, on Tuesday morning, the Inquirer raised the obvious question: at what point would Our Betters decide that the ‘pandemic’ was over?
Everyone’s asking when the pandemic will be over. Here’s how we’ll know.
If COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations did eventually reach levels usually associated with the flu, would that be a reasonable benchmark for saying the pandemic was over?
by Tom Avril, Jason Laughlin, and Laura McCrystal | Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Throughout each day, Cheryl Bettigole receives granular, neighborhood-level updates on the numbers we’ve all been hearing for months. The percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19. Transmission rates. Hospitalizations, deaths, and progress with vaccines — in Philadelphia and beyond.
The lines on the graphs often bounce around like the stock market. Yet at some point the city’s acting health commissioner and policymakers throughout the country have to reduce it all to a pivotal yes-or-no question:
Is it OK to resume life as normal?
“Things are trending in the right direction,” Bettigole said last week. “But we’re not past COVID.”
It is now generally accepted that COVID will always be with us in some form, much like seasonal coronaviruses that cause the common cold. But thanks to vaccines and the lingering immunity that many have acquired through infection, the share of the population protected from severe disease continues to grow.
That trend has infectious disease experts predicting that sometime in the not-so-distant future, perhaps a matter of months, the disease will become “endemic” — still circulating, yet not out of control.
What level is low enough to know we’ve crossed that line? And who decides what is normal?
That last is the real question: just who gets to decide what’s “normal,” when the government will stop trying to run people’s lives?
But, what we will see is that while masking policies will fall away, because people are going to simply refuse, political leaders are going to continue to press for mandatory vaccinations, claiming that, if the virus is ‘endemic’ it still needs to be fought by requiring vaccinations. The Patricians will not want to give up control over the plebeians.
References
| ↑1 | It’s quite common for parochial schools to have lower tuition rates for parishioners, and parishioners are expected to make contributions to the church. |
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