Tag Archives: #MaskMandate

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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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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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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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Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!

Despite the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines appear to have little, if any, effect in reducing the transmissibility of the virus, especially the Omicron variant, the tinhorn dictators want to separate people from each other, want to impose restrictions on a segment of the population who haven’t Obeyed Orders. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    A new vaccine mandate is poised to impact Philadelphia’s restaurants next week

    How restaurant owners can prepare for new vaccine mandate rules in the new year.

    by Gene Marks | Tuesday, December 28, 2021 | 12:24 PM EST

    Starting Jan. 3 indoor eateries in Philadelphia will be required to see proof from patrons of vaccination against COVID-19.

    The rule doesn’t fully take effect immediately. Through Jan. 17, restaurants can choose to accept a negative COVID-19 test within 24 hours of entry instead of proof of vaccination. But after that date, only proof of vaccination will be acceptable.

I am, as I have stated previously, both fully vaccinated and have taken the booster shot, though the booster was not recorded when I took the photo of my vaccination record for this site. It is on my card now.

But I absolutely refuse to carry this vaccination record with me! I got vaccinated for my own protection, something wise since my wife is a hospital nurse who sometimes takes care of COVID patients, but I will not comply with the petty little bureaucrats who say, “Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!” “Ve need to see your papers!” The business which makes such a demand of me will not only not see my papers, but will never, ever, get a single penny from me.

Maybe that’s easy for me, here in the Bluegrass State, where we aren’t seeing such stupidity. I have already noted that while Kroger KR: (%) has masking requirements to enter its stores, most people ignore the signs, or at least the requirements, and shop without putting on a face diaper.

We’re now being told that cloth face masks are ineffective anyway, so the face mask requirements, which Kentuckians have naturally seen as ineffective anyway, are ridiculous.

    The rule also applies to employees. A restaurant’s staff as well as young patrons ages 5 to 11 will be required to have one dose of COVID-19 vaccine by Jan. 3 and to complete the series by Feb. 3. Exemptions apply to children under age 5, people with medical reasons and those with religious objections.

    Just about every establishment that serves food and/or drink will be affected by this rule, from cafes, bars and sports venues to movies theaters, bowling alleys, and food halls.Obviously, these new rules will add another strain on local restaurants that are already grappling with existing mandates, rising prices, and shortages of supplies and labor.And while these rules extend only to indoor dining, concerns have been raised that they will go into effect before new legislation can make permanent the outdoor dining structures that have sprung up during the pandemic.

So, Philadelphians are going to have to carry their supposedly private medical records with them if they want to eat indoors at a restaurant — and who wants to eat outdoors, in Philadelphia, in January and February — even though the Omicron variant, which is fast becoming, if it has not already become, the dominant variant in the United States, seems to slide past the vaccines with virtually no reduction in transmissibility.

Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) and Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole cannot be unaware of those statistics, and those facts, but they certainly do love them some authoritarian power, and are choosing to exercise it, as much as they can, without any reason to do so. If the vaccines do not reduce transmission, then there is no reason whatsoever to put in place vaccine mandates. If the vaccines do not reduce transmissibility, but only help to reduce the severity of symptoms for those who contract the virus, then the only people put at greater risk of serious illness are those who choose not to get vaccinated. At that point, it’s their risk, and their risk alone. If masks do not reduce the transmissibility, then there is no reason to require masks; there is no greater danger to the public from those who don’t wear masks than from those who do.

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You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to note that actual conspirators wouldn’t do anything differently

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:

    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:

    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

    By Lena H. Sun, Joel Achenbach, Laurie McGinley, and Tyler Pager | Tuesday, December 14, 2021 | 3:08 PM EST | Updated: 8:02 PM EDT

    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.

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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.

More at this link.

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!

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#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.

We have reported, more than once, that despite individual venues requiring the wearing of face masks, those ‘requirements’ are being honored in the breach. Just yesterday, at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, despite this sign being posted by the interior door of the vestibule, requiring masks of all customers, around half, and possible more, of the customers were not wearing masks. Another sign, outside the exterior doors, said “Masks strongly encouraged for fully vaccinated individuals,” meaning that the signs were inconsistent with each other, but there was, of course, no attempt made that I saw, or have ever seen, to enforce either sign.

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

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.