Tag Archives: #VaccinePassports

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Taylor Lorenz loves to express her opinions, but doesn’t really want other people expressing their opinions back to her

Taylor Lorenz, from her Twitter profile.

We have previously mentioned Taylor Lorenz, who covers technology and online culture for The Washington Post. Miss Lorenz is probably most famous for her article doxing Chaya Raichik, the previously anonymous lady who ran the Twitter site Libs of TikTok. LoTT’s schtick is to find the silliest things leftists put on the social media site Tik Tok, and snark them for sensible people on Twitter. Basically, LoTT is mocking people for their own exposed stupidity. My good friend Amanda Marcotte of Salon loved that LoTT was doxed, doubtlessly hoping that Miss Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job — she wrote in September of 2021 that the unvaccinated should all lose their jobs, and retweeted it with the same message just four days ago — and posted back in April a hope that Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed. Miss Lorenz was also appalled that the Biden Administration’s plans to open a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security.

Miss Lorenz previously told us that she was immunocompromised, though I have included that link to show that I once saw it; she has since deleted it. Thus, the image of one of her latest threads is just that, a screen captured image. Of course, it had to be screen capped because Miss Lorenz, who has her tweets protected and limited to her “approved followers” — Miss Lorenz has, as of this writing, 355,400 followers, but she follows only 8,674 people — both restricts those who can reply to it and set it so that her tweet cannot be retweeted. It is interesting that someone with the blue checkmark of being a high-profile person, who has the major public soapbox of a Washington Post reporter, and believed that Chaya Raichik needed to be doxed, has her tweets protected.

If it’s difficult to read what she tweeted, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

You know, I get it: Miss Lorenz is immunocompromised herself, and thus she has a personal reason to see the rest of us forcibly vaccinated and masked for the rest of our lives. But most people realize that the masks don’t really do much, and that the vaccines neither prevent people from contracting the virus nor prevent those who do contract it from transmitting it to others. And, as I have noted previously, it’s not just evil reich-wing American conservatives: in our family’s recent travels, we flew on Air Canada and Swissair, and were in airports in Toronto, Amsterdam, Aberdeen, Zurich, Tel Aviv, Istanbul and Kuwait City, and on neither any flights nor in any of those airports were there mask mandates, vaccine records checks, nor more than a small minority of people wearing masks voluntarily.

No, I don’t want Miss Lorenz to contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus. For the vast majority of people, as it was for me, it’s like an annoying cold or flu bug for a few days, but nothing debilitating. For someone immunocompromised as she is, it could be significantly worse. But there comes a point at which the vast majority of people cannot and should not have their rights and freedoms restricted for the benefit of a relatively few.

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Watch out! The signs are there that the Biden Administration wants to reimpose mask mandates

As my good friend, and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach recently noted, the twenty leaders at the G20 ‘summit’ “signed a declaration to introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel.”

I embedded my own tweet here:

I should have included Istanbul and Kuwait City, those being the airports at which SSG Pico stopped on her (too short) pass to meet me in Jerusalem.

While Representative Massie said that the American people had moved on, he was too restrictive: as nearly as any of us could see, much of the world have moved on as well.

But, of course, the Biden Administration wants to instill fear, because that’s better for government to control people. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

CDC Director Walensky is urging people to wear masks indoors and on public transit, raising alarms about the ‘tridemic’

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will speak at a health summit in Philadelphia Tuesday.

by Jason Laughlin and Sarah Gantz | Tuesday, December 6, 2022 | 10:21 AM EST

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky is in Philadelphia today to speak about pressing public health threats as officials raise alarms about the so-called “tridemic” — a surge of influenza, RSV and COVID-19 cases straining the health system.

“The past several years have certainly not been easy, and now we face another surge of illness, another moment of overstretched capacity, and one of tragic and often preventable sadness,” Walensky said during a CDC press briefing Monday.

Would that be the same Dr Walensky who told us, “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus — they don’t get sick”?

She is expected to address a crowd of medical professionals and public health stakeholders today at the Bloomberg American Health Summit, taking place at Loews Hotel Philadelphia in Center City.

The CDC has recorded at least 8.7 million cases of flu, including 78,000 hospitalizations and 4,500 deaths since October, the Washington Post reported.

Children’s hospitals have been flooded with cases of RSV, a flu-like virus that can cause severe respiratory problems among very young children and those with underlying health conditions.

Flu season hits every year. And nurses, such as my wonderful wife, know that RSV season hits pediatric hospitals every year, the government wasn’t trying to push indoor and travel masking for the flu and RSV. They got away with doing so due to the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; I spelled it exactly the way it should be spelled — so now they want to try it again.;

“Our hospital is filling up with young babies that are struggling to breathe,” James Reingold, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, told the Inquirer in early November.

COVID cases and hospitalizations are also rising in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but remain within the range the region has seen over the past two months.

In her remarks to reporters Monday, Walensky urged people to be proactive in protecting themselves and others by seeing a doctor if they have symptoms, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask indoors and on public transportation.

That last fits in with what Mr Massie stated, that the President “is still fighting in federal court to reinstate the airplane mask mandate.” The federal government sure loves them some arbitrary and authoritarian power!

I had said that masks weren’t much in evidence in my recent travels, but it’s also true that there were at least a few people who chose to wear them. And that’s the point: they chose to wear them. If someone feels either the need or desire to wear a mask, I have no way of knowing what his reasons and decision-taking processes were, and it’s really none of my business. But when the government tries to force people to wear them, then it becomes my business, and my answer is what it will always be: not just no, but Hell no!

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Will the next set of #COVID19 restrictions come on November 9th?

As we noted on Saturday, the Editorial Board of The Washington Post do not think that we have been scared of COVID-19 enough. That was an editorial; here comes what passes for a straight news story:

As the BA.5 variant spreads, the risk of coronavirus reinfection grows

By Joel Achenbach | Sunday, July 10, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT

America has decided the pandemic is over. The coronavirus has other ideas.

The latest omicron offshoot, BA.5, has quickly become dominant in the United States, and thanks to its elusiveness when encountering the human immune system, is driving a wave of cases across the country.

The Post illustrated the article with a photo captioned, “Commuters board the subway in New York, which still requires masks on trains and indoor stations.” There were very few people in the photo visibly wearing masks.

The size of that wave is unclear because most people are testing at home or not testing at all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the past week has reported a little more than 100,000 new cases a day on average. But infectious-disease experts know that wildly underestimates the true number, which may be as many as a million, said Eric Topol, a professor at Scripps Research who closely tracks pandemic trends.

They know that it “wildly underestimates” the true number? How do they know this?

Many of the at-home COVID tests use your cell phone to read the test data, though apparently not all of them do. I’m waiting for the government to mandate that tests using a smartphone require the phone to send the test results to the government, and to pull from the market at-home tests which do not require a smartphone.

Is that paranoid? Perhaps a little, but the left have shown no concern at all for people’s privacy when it comes to the virus, and a fascistic bent toward requiring people to get vaccinated and wear masks.

I admit it: when I see the name “Topol,” I think of Reb Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. Orthodox Jewish men traditionally use the honorific Reb to honor their ancestors. Click to enlarge.

Antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against BA.5, leading Topol to call it “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”

“The worst version of the virus that we’ve seen”? Well, that’s what the headline on last Thursday’s Post editorial called it, but somehow, someway, this “worst version” has yet to result in significantly more hospitalizations.

Other experts point out that, despite being hit by multiple rounds of ever-more-contagious omicron subvariants, the country has not yet seen a dramatic spike in hospitalizations. About 38,000 people were hospitalized nationally with covid as of Friday, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. That figure has been steadily rising since early March, but remains far below the record 162,000 patients hospitalized with covid in mid-January. The average daily death toll on Friday stood at 329 and has not changed significantly over the past two months.

Let’s do the math: 38,000 ÷ 162,000 = 0.2345679012345679, or 23.46%, slightly less than ¼ of the number of the less contagious BA.1 Omicron variant that was primarily seen last January.

Restrictions and mandates are long gone. Air travel is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. Political leaders aren’t talking about the virus — it’s virtually a nonissue on the campaign trail. Most people are done with masking, social distancing and the pandemic generally. They’re taking their chances with the virus.

Well, of course. Both Republican and Democratic candidates know that the public are fed up with the restrictions, and have been for a long time now. With the restrictions gone, Republicans have no issue against which to campaign, and the last thing that the Democrats want is to have the voters thinking that they’ll try to reimpose them. I linked that photo of New Yorkers boarding the train; despite the stated restrictions, even liberal New Yorkers aren’t obeying them.

So, what are the credentialed media trying to do here? They know as well as the politicians that the public will simply not obey a reimposition of restrictions, but the media aren’t running for election; they simply have to make certain that their stories don’t negatively affect Democratic candidates in an election that’s just four months away.

But they are setting it up, just in case BA.5 does turn out to be as bad as Dr Topol might have you believe, because if the urban Democrats — it won’t be Republicans, anywhere — try to reimpose restrictions, they’ll have some cover from a media which will say, “See, we told you so!”

Perhaps the next set of restrictions will come on November 9th?

This article was from The Washington Post, but The Philadelphia Inquirer published it as well, and we’ve seen how Philly’s city government, wholly dominated by liberal Democrats, has been very willing to put restrictions on people, though they had to drop the last mandate due to politics.

I don’t expect the Democrats trying to reimpose mandates soon, because the election is approaching, but I will never underestimate their desire to control your life.

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Ihre Papiere, bitte!

As we have previously noted, with the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home. If you think that the government is not interested in your medical records, and would never actually check them, think again. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A digital COVID vaccination record is coming in Philly, but is there a need?

A digital vaccination card is coming to Philly, but not many places are asking for the record any more.

by Kasturi Pananjady and Jason Laughlin | Friday, May 27, 2022 | 9:09 AM EDT

Philadelphia is pushing ahead with an effort to issue digital vaccine cards to residents, though businesses and health experts say they may be irrelevant at this stage in the pandemic.

The digital record encrypts the same vaccination information found on paper cards in a QR code format that can be scanned by businesses and others seeking to confirm vaccine status.

“There is a value, but its uptake would be very limited,” said Tinglong Dai, professor of operations management and business analytics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “People don’t really use vaccination records much unless you travel outside the United States.”

The city is moving ahead with the system despite ending its vaccine mandate for indoor dining in February. It has no plans to renew any COVID-19 safety restrictions. It declined to say when the digital cards will be available, citing technical issues with the rollout.

Proof of vaccination, though, is useful for more than just access to indoor dining, said Matt Rankin, a spokesperson for the health department. Some businesses do still require customers prove vaccination, as do many employers and schools, Rankin said. The digital proof of vaccination would also be helpful as people get booster shots.

There’s more at the original, and I can’t just quote it all; that’s plagiarism and a copyright violation, but the article noted several points:

  • Philadelphia had planned an online portal for vaccination records even before the panicdemic.
  • People seeking their vaccination records must use a two-factor identification process, including a digital log-in which would send an e-mail or text message for authentication. If the system did not have an e-mail or cell phone number on file, the system wouldn’t work for that individual, so the city askedg vaccine providers to maintain up to date contact information in January.
  • Public health services been seeking a national vaccination database that physicians could access, but such nas not yet been created.

Some of the systems which would be used to scan the QR code in a digital vaccination record do not retain the information, but that does not mean that all of them do. You could ask the doorman who scans your code, but he might not actually know, nor do you have any way to verify that he’s telling the truth when he does answer.

It is, of course, for our own good, right? After all, COVID-19 was a serious public health emergency, right? So, naturally, those not vaccinated simply needed to be excluded from all of public life, right?

So, if “gun violence” is a “public health emergency,” the way the left keep telling us, then the same justifications used to infringe on our constitutional rights during the panicdemic will be available against people who own firearms, won’t they? Except, of course, that would only apply to law-abiding people whom the government know have firearms, not the thugs carrying them illegally.

Expect calls for a national firearms registry!

Political interest in a national record-keeping system sparked by the pandemic has recently waned. That’s in part because vaccinated people are still able to transmit the virus, making vaccination less critical as a tool to prevent COVID’s spread.

It’s something of a surprise that the Inquirer admitted what we already knew, that the various vaccinations, while they seem to mitigate the virulence of the disease, don’t appear to do much in preventing people from either contracting or spreading the virus. In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” Remember: this was during the first Xi Omicron variant, before there was any real spread of the BA.2 Xi Omicron variant, which is, supposedly, even more infectious.

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Much of the public are just plain fed up with masking!

We have previously noted Ana Cabera Neilson’s tweet, in which she said:

Just boarded a flight to Atlanta. I think I’ll stick with my mask a little longer. (I’d say it’s about 50-50 on this flight. Everyone treating each other respectfully)

That’s the way things should be: take your own decisions on what you wish to do, and respect other people’s choices on how they wish to behave.

Of course, the Usual Suspects are appalled. New York Times OpEd columnist Paul Krugman tweeted:

A prediction about masking: Soon we’ll be seeing many incidents in which those who choose to protect themselves with KN95s etc face harassment, even violence. Because this was never about freedom.

The distinguished Dr Krugman tends to go extreme when it comes to his dislike of conservatives, so this is no surprise, but I’d be surprised if there are more than a few isolated incidents of such. Virginia Kruta had the best response:

More likely: if we even notice that someone else has chosen to wear a mask, the worst they’ll get from us as we go about our business is an eye-roll.

Also read: Robert Stacy McCain: The Weird Logic of COVID-19 Panic

Alas! To the snowflake left, even an eyeroll might be called harassment, a ‘micro-aggression,’ and even a threat of violence. My darling bride, of 42 years, 11 months, and two days, has accused me of rolling my eyes in the past. 🙂

Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC let slip her real reasoning, saying, “did announcing the end of the mask mandate literally in the middle of the flight kind of let those a-holes win?”

That’s pretty much all it has ever been: the ‘progressives’ wanting to keep restrictions for as long as possible, because they didn’t want to let conservatives win.

In the City of Brotherly Love, where the voters gave Joe Biden a whopping 81.44% of their votes, there are plenty of signs that that very Democratic city is just as fed up with mask mandates as anyplace else. The authoritarian dictators there reinstated an indoor mask mandate, beginning on Monday, April 18th. Indoor spaces can go mask-free if the space owners verify that everyone entering has been vaccinated; if this step is not taken, then everyone, vaccinated or otherwise, must wear a mask.

But SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, is not under the city’s authority, and SEPTA’s executives decided to drop masking requirements in its stations and conveyances:

Here’s how SEPTA decided to lift its mask requirement after a federal judge canceled the national mandate

The Justice Department said Tuesday that it may appeal the ruling, but only if the CDC wants to extend the mask requirement.

by Thomas Fitzgerald and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, April 19, 2022

On Monday afternoon, SEPTA officials rushed to digest and respond to a federal judge’s order obliterating the national mask requirement for passengers on public transportation.

At first, the agency said it would “for now” continue to require masks in its stations and on its commuter trains, subways, buses, and trolleys.

But after 9 p.m., SEPTA announced riders could feel free to slip off their masks if they wished.

It joined NJ Transit and other peer transit systems in Washington, Boston, and Atlanta, as well as Amtrak, the national passenger railroad, in dropping mask mandates. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle kept their requirements in force.

And Tuesday evening, the Biden administration said it will appeal the judge’s ruling if the CDC wants to extend its masking directive, which was due to expire May 3.

If filed, an appeal could complicate SEPTA’s decision if either the judge herself or the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issues a stay of Monday’s order voiding the federal mask rule.

There is a legal point here. A District Court Judge’s ruling does not set a legal precedent, but if the Court of Appeals rules on the question, that does set a precedent . . . and judges appointed by President Donald Trump comprise the majority on the 11th Circuit. The Biden Administration might choose to let the decision stand rater than risk a precedent-setting decision that goes against them, in case there is another COVID surge later in the year.

The money line was further down:

In the end, SEPTA’s executive team and board members decided it made little sense to keep in place the terms of a federal mandate that no longer existed, officials said. And above all, there was a concern for employees, who had already been subject to abuse and harassment while asking riders to mask up during the pandemic.

“We didn’t want our frontline workers, who’ve been heroic, to be in a challenging spot,” said CEO Leslie S. Richards. “Our customers certainly know about the court decision, and they know we can’t really enforce it.”

That’s right: the public know! And the city was leaving enforcement of the reinstated mask mandate up to cute coeds working as restaurant hostesses and bodega owners more worried about armed robbers to enforce the mask mandate.

What needs to be stressed now, to those who have objected to the mask mandates on the basis of freedom and individual rights is that other people also have individual rights, and those who wish to continue to wear masks have every right to do so. We should respect them, in ways they did not respect us.

The New York Times reported that the Department of Justice has appealed the judge’s ruling. I guess that we’ll see what happens.

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COVID restrictions are for the plebeians, not the Patricians The autocrats who demanded that you mask up partied hearty without them, even though their servants had to wear face diapers

My good friend — well, good internet friend, anyway; I’ve never actually met him — William Teach noted with some amusement that the hoitiest of the toitiest got together for a Washington party, and BAM! a bunch of them contracted the virus:

    Oops: Big COVID Outbreak From Gridiron Club Dinner

    by William Teach | April 8, 2022 | 6:45 AM EDT

    There are all the people who screeched at people for refusing to be OK with masking and lockdowns and such, who were in favor of government tyranny:

      After Gridiron Dinner, a covid outbreak among Washington A-list guests

      Raimondo, Schiff, Castro, Garland and several other officials or journalists tested positive after the elite Gridiron dinner

      By Paul Farhi, Roxanne Roberts and Yasmeen Abutaleb | Wednesday, April 6, 2022 |Updated: Wednesday, April 6, 2022 | 5:29 PM EDT

      More than a dozen guests who attended Saturday night’s Gridiron Club dinner — including two Cabinet members, two members of Congress and a top aide to Vice President Harris — have since tested positive for coronavirus, sending ripples of anxiety through a city on the cusp of restarting its traditional social whirl after a two-year pause.

      A-list guests were asked to show proof of vaccination but not negative tests, and many mingled freely without masks at the dinner at the downtown Renaissance Washington Hotel.

      But by Wednesday, Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had announced they had tested positive. They were soon followed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who requested a test Wednesday afternoon after learning he may have been exposed — and discovered that he, too, carried the virus. Thus far, none have reported serious illness.

Gina Raimondo Moffit, as you may recall, when she was Governor of Rhode Island, ordered checks first of all New Yorkers, and then all people from out of state, at the beginning of the COVID-19 scare. She even sent the National Guard door-to-door in coastal resort areas to order out-of-state visitors to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Mrs Moffit, as you might have guessed, grew up in privilege.

Gina Marie Raimondo was born in 1971 in Smithfield, Rhode Island, where she later grew up. Of Italian descent, she is the youngest of Josephine (Piro) and Joseph Raimondo’s three children. Her father, Joseph (1926–2014), made his career at the Bulova watch factory in Providence, Rhode Island. He became unemployed at 56 when the Bulova company decamped operations to China, shuttering the factory in Providence. Raimondo was a childhood friend of U.S. Senator Jack Reed. Raimondo graduated from LaSalle Academy,[1]Current tuition for Grade 12: $16,625. While financial aid is available for ninth through twelfth grades, it is not for middle schoolers. This isn’t a school for poor people. She did veto a … Continue reading in Providence, as one of the first girls allowed to attend the Catholic school, where she was valedictorian.

Raimondo graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in economics from Harvard College in 1993, where she served on the staff of The Harvard Crimson. While at Harvard, she resided in Quincy House. She attended New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Arts (MA) degree and Doctor of Philosophy in 2002 in sociology. Her thesis was on single motherhood and supervised by Stephen Nickell and Anne H. Gauthier while she was a postgraduate student of New College, Oxford. Raimondo received her Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1998.

Following her graduation from law school, Raimondo served as a law clerk to federal judge Kimba Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Later, Raimondo acted as senior vice president for fund development at the Manhattan offices of Village Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and backed by Bain Capital and Highland Capital Groups.

Raimondo returned to Rhode Island in 2000 to co-found the state’s first venture capital firm, Point Judith Capital. Point Judith subsequently relocated its offices to Boston, Massachusetts. At Point Judith, Raimondo served as a general partner covering health care investments; she retains some executive duties with the firm.

A strong advocate of authoritarian COVID-19 restrictions, Mrs Moffit apparently saw those restrictions as being for Other People, not for her.

Mrs Moffit was hardly the only one. The Washington Post original lists many of the guests, and if the Post’s paywall stops you from reading it there, Mr Teach included the link to the same story on Yahoo!, which is free.[2]Yeah, I’m paying for a subscription to The Washington Post.

    Tom DeFrank, a contributing columnist for National Journal and president of the Gridiron Club, said that as of Wednesday afternoon, the group knew of 14 guests who had tested positive.

    “There is no way of being certain about when they first contracted covid,” he said in a statement. “But they did interact with other guests during the night and we have to be realistic and expect some more cases.”

    About half of the cases appeared to have been clustered at three tables, he said, and the club was taking steps to notify anyone who sat next to or across from the infected guests.

    How many of the infections began at the dinner and how serious the outbreak will prove to be remains unclear. Many of the guests have jobs that require regular testing that catches some asymptomatic cases. Castro and Raimondo said they are suffering only mild symptoms while Schiff said he is “feeling fine” — and touted the value of vaccinations and boosters.

    But the outbreak at the Gridiron — where some of the comic skits featured actors dressed as the coronavirus, like large, green bouncing balls with red frills — highlights the personal risk-benefit balancing act much of the country will be negotiating as the pandemic subsides.

Mr Teach again:

    Not that wearing a mask really would have made much difference, but, these are the Elites, so, even if masking was required, only the servants would have been required to wear one. . . . .

    Who wants to be they had no masks on? Oh, wait, what’s this?

      The dinner was supposed to reflect a return to normalcy after being canceled the past two years because of the pandemic. Few guests wore masks or observed social distancing, according to people in attendance. Only the serving staff was consistently masked throughout the evening. While organizers asked attendees to show their vaccination cards at the door, there was no requirement to be tested.

    Who’s surprised that the peons were forced to mask up?

Emphasis Mr Teach’s.

Here we had an “A-List” event — my invitation was apparently lost in the mail! — in which everybody was required to show their papers, their vaccination cards[3]Yes, I have been vaccinated, but I absolutely refuse to carry my vaccination records, and anyone who demands to see my papers, “Papiere, bitte,” will receive an unpolite response., though not required to show the results of a recent test — I wonder if the latter included the servants — yet still the virus apparently propagated from vaccinated person to vaccinated person.

And now, as I predicted three days ago, The Philadelphia Inquirer is projecting that the City of Brotherly Love will reimpose its indoor mask mandate:

    Philly’s indoor mask mandate likely to return next week, as city COVID-19 cases creep upward

    Masks may soon again be needed in public indoor spaces next week, according to a city official.

    by Felicia Gans Sobey, John Duchneskie, and Jason Laughlin | Wednesday, April 6, 2022

    Philadelphia is poised to reinstate its indoor mask mandate next week as COVID-19 cases climb again.

    An Inquirer analysis showed the most current COVID case counts and the percent increase of cases both meet the city’s benchmarks that would trigger the return of the mask mandate for public indoor spaces. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health agreed with the analysis.

    “What we see and know is cases are rising,” said James Garrow, a spokesperson for the department. “People should start taking precautions now.”

    The Inquirer analysis isn’t predictive, and it is possible that key metrics triggering the return of the mask mandate could decrease by Monday. It’s “certainly possible,” Garrow said, but the city has not yet reached the peak of the case increase that appears to be building now. The city will review Monday’s hospitalization numbers and the last seven days of case counts to decide whether to change policies.

    The COVID data are not alarming enough to warrant an immediate change in the city’s mask policies, though, he said. The city has said it would announce changes to its COVID safety requirements on Mondays, and an announcement on whether mask requirements would return would likely come then, Garrow said. If the COVID metrics stay around where they are now, or increase, the health department could choose not to resume mandating masks indoors, he said, but it’s unlikely.

There’s more at the original, but I have to ask: after five weeks of freedom from the odious mask mandate, just how many Philadelphians will obey a new one? After all, even Dr Anthony Fauci is predicting that almost everyone will contract the virus anyway:

    FDA Head: ‘Most people are going to get COVID’

    By Ralph Ellis | January 13, 2022

    With a record number of COVID-19 cases being reported, two top U.S. health officials made a stark prediction on Tuesday: Most Americans eventually will be infected with the virus.

    “I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is most people are going to get COVID,” FDA acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock, MD, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.

    Woodcock had been asked if the United States needed to change its COVID strategy. She said people need to accept the reality of widespread infection so the nation can focus on maintaining “continuity of operations” in crucial sectors.

    “What we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens,” she said. “I think after that will be a good time to reassess how we’re approaching this pandemic.”

    Anthony Fauci, MD, chief White House medical adviser, said COVID will infect “just about everybody.”

    “Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Fauci said in a virtual fireside chat with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

There’s more at the original, but note: this was prior to the BA.2 variant making its appearance.

The obvious question becomes: if almost everybody is going to contract the virus anyway, why should we impose onerous personal restrictions on people? Full disclosure: despite an illness last December, which my wife, an RN who works in a hospital treating COVID patients, said appeared to be COVID, I tested negative for the virus twice around that illness; either the tests were inaccurate, or I had some other bug. If I have ever had COVID, I was completely asymptomatic.

References

References
↑1 Current tuition for Grade 12: $16,625. While financial aid is available for ninth through twelfth grades, it is not for middle schoolers. This isn’t a school for poor people. She did veto a bill that would have harmed charter schools in Rhode Island.
↑2 Yeah, I’m paying for a subscription to The Washington Post.
↑3 Yes, I have been vaccinated, but I absolutely refuse to carry my vaccination records, and anyone who demands to see my papers, “Papiere, bitte,” will receive an unpolite response.
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Show me the money!

Jerry Maguire was a 1996 film starring Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding, Jr, which made memorable the phrase, “Show me the money!” Now Moderna is shouting the same thing.

    Moderna seeks FDA authorization for 4th dose of COVID-19 shot

    Drugmaker Moderna has asked the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a fourth shot of its COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose for all adults.

    by Zeke Miller, The Associated Press | Friday, March 18, 2022 | 8:29 AM EDT

    WASHINGTON — Drugmaker Moderna asked the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday to authorize a fourth shot of its COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose for all adults.

    The request is broader than rival pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s request earlier this week for the regulator to approve a booster shot for all seniors.

    In a press release, the company said its request for approval for all adults was made “to provide flexibility” to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical providers to determine the “appropriate use” of a second booster dose of the mRNA vaccine, “including for those at higher risk of COVID-19 due to age or comorbidities.”

    U.S. officials have been laying the groundwork to deliver additional booster doses to shore up the vaccines’ protection against serious disease and death from COVID-19. The White House has been sounding the alarm that it needs Congress to “urgently” approve more funding for the federal government to secure more doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, either for additional booster shots or variant-specific immunizations.

And there you have it: those ‘free’ COVID-19 vaccine shots were all paid for by someone, and, as we all know, it was the federal government. The vaccine manufacturers, naturally, want in on the government’s distribution of electrons distributed from government accounts cash, and Moderna one-upped Pfizer. But while Moderna went straight to the boosters for everyone in their application, Pfizer’s Chief Executive Officer laid the groundwork for his company to do the same:

    Pfizer’s CEO says a fourth COVID-19 vaccine dose is probably necessary for everyone

    The Pfizer executive said a fourth dose would provide long-term protection. But not all public health experts agree it’s necessary for everyone.

    by Jason Laughlin | Monday, March 14, 2022

    Another round of shots will be needed to provide more long-lasting protection against COVID-19, vaccine-maker Pfizer’s chief executive said in a weekend interview, but opinions vary on who really needs that fourth dose.

    “Right now, the way that we have seen, it is necessary, a fourth booster,” said Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO, in an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, explaining that another dose could protect against future variants and waning immunity, which is why people who are fully vaccinated and boosted have been getting mild cases of COVID.

In other words, “Show me the money!”

    Some health experts have questioned whether it is realistic or necessary to have a vaccine that prevents even mild illness — when from the start the main goal of the vaccine has been to prevent serious cases and hospitalizations.

    Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, has said people who have had the existing vaccine series likely won’t have to worry about serious illness and death from COVID for years, even if they skip additional shots. Preventing serious illness and death should be the goal of the country’s vaccination program, he said, not staving off COVID entirely.

It’s simple: if the CEOs can keep “staving off COVID entirely” as the goal, it will mean more revenue for their company. More, it’s risk-free money! 42 U.S. Code § 300aa–22 states that “No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.” The law continues to require that the vaccines covered must have proper paperwork — meaning: documents warning patients that side effects can occur — and that manufacturers must use proper care of the production cycle to remain immune, or, in other words, do not deviate from proper procedures.

What vaccine producer wouldn’t love this?

Then there’s the third problem for the vaccine producers:

    Millions still haven’t gotten COVID shots. What does that mean for the future of the vaccination effort?

    The slowdown raises questions about how long resources should be spent on outreach and whether the strategies of the last year are still effective in persuading the unvaccinated.

    by Justine McDaniel and Erin McCarthy | Friday, March 18, 2022

    It’s 2 p.m. on a Wednesday in Chester, and nurses Susan Pollock and Carol Von Colln are inside a Delaware County vaccine clinic doing what they spend a lot of time doing these days: waiting.

    Last spring, Americans were in a frenzied rush to get the COVID-19 vaccine; this spring, business has slowed to a crawl. Now, whenever someone walks in, “we’re ready to throw a party,” Von Colln said.

    That day, they vaccinated eight people in six hours.

    It’s a scene playing out across the region and the United States as the number of shots being given each day is at an all-time low — even though a third of Americans are still unvaccinated.

It was the subtitle that got to me, “The slowdown raises questions about how long resources should be spent on outreach and whether the strategies of the last year are still effective in persuading the unvaccinated.” “Persuading the unvaccinated”? No, the “strategies of the last year” were primarily to try to force people to take the vaccines, by threatening them with the loss of their jobs if they declined vaccinations, and imposing requirements for people to show their vaccination records to enter some public spaces. President Biden said, “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do.” Of course, the mask mandates that existed took no distinction between those who were vaccinated and those who were not.

Full disclosure: I have been vaccinated myself, a choice I took freely, and I believe that others should take the same decision I did. While no vaccine is 100% without risk, the benefits of being vaccinated outweigh the risks. But I respect the right, and yes, “right” is precisely the word I mean to use, of other people to choose whether or not to take the vaccine. That’s a right that the left, and neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, don’t seem to want you to have.

Remember: the left are pro-choice on exactly one thing!

There’s a lot more at the original, but it shows why the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna want another booster: almost all of those who have thus far chosen not to get vaccinated are unlikely to change their minds, so more money from the government to those producers depends upon getting those who have taken three shots so far to get a fourth.

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“I’m from the government and I’m here to help!”

Remember the halcyon days of 2020 and 2021, in which Philadelphia, among most major cities, allowed restaurants which had been otherwise closed to indoor dining, to expand, where they physically could, to outdoor dining facilities? A challenging problem in a city which experiences severe winters, outdoor dining and increased carry-out ordering enabled many restaurants to survive.

Philly quietly added surprise fees and ‘burdensome’ rules for restaurant streeteries

“It’s a bureaucratic mess,” said Councilmember Allan Domb. “This is basically the administration saying ‘we don’t want outdoor seating.’”

by Max Marin | Tuesday, Match 1, 2022

Philadelphia city officials quietly released regulations governing the city’s new streetery law after months of anticipation, and some restaurant owners say the proposed red tape could spell doomsday for outdoor dining across the city.

Read more: Hundreds of restaurants got excluded by Philly’s new ‘streetery’ zones — some by less than a block

Many restaurant owners realized new rules passed by City Council in December would require them to clean up access-blocking patio structures and get designs approved by the city for outdoor dining structures built over parking spaces.

But in implementing that law, Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration is adding new regulations that create significant and unexpected hurdles for restaurateurs still struggling to recover from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

There’s a lot more at the Philadelphia Inquirer original, but the new regulations all boil down to one thing: the city charging more money, for permits, for bonds, and for construction requirements.

The timeline:

  • March 16, 2020: City orders all non-essential businesses closed
  • September 8, 2020: Indoor dining allowed at a maximum of 25% of seating capacity
  • November 20, 2020: City again bans all indoor dining in restaurants
  • January 16, 2021: City again allows indoor dining at a maximum of 25% of seating capacity
  • June 2, 2021: City removes seating capacity restrictions
  • August 12, 2021: City imposes mask mandates for all indoor businesses
  • January 3, 2022: City requires proof of vaccination for all restaurant employees and patrons
  • February 16, 2022: City drops vaccination proof requirements, continues mask mandates

All of these restrictions were either imposed or relaxed as the city saw surges in COVID-19 infections, the original, the Delta variant, and lastly, the Xi Omicron variant. Omicron peaked very rapidly, and with a far greater number of cases, than either Alpha or Delta, with more than thrice the average number of daily cases in Philly — because vaccinations and masks were virtually useless against Omicron — but one thing is obvious: if COVID-19 has been going through all of these mutations, there is no particular reason to think that Omicron will be the last. The odds are that there will be a Pi variant — though maybe some will call it the Putin variant, given today’s news — which may or may not be serious, but if another serious variant arises, wouldn’t the availability of outdoor dining be something Philadelphia would want?

Even without a new variant, there are still plenty of people panicked by COVID-19, and would choose to dine outdoors if the option is available. Given that the city believe that masks are still necessary indoors but not outside, why wouldn’t the city want to encourage the continuation of outdoor dining where feasible?

But nope! The city are going to go for the dollars rather than make it easier for the outdoor dining areas to continue. There’s a reason why, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” is dismissed as a skeptical meme.
___________________________
Update: 3:15 PM EST

Philadelphia ends its indoor mask mandate

“The metrics that we’re following have reached the level where the Health Department feels it is safe to stop enforcing the indoor mask mandate,” a health department spokesperson said.

by Jason Laughlin | Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022 | 3:00 PM EST

The end of Philadelphia’s indoor mask mandate came Wednesday with a promise to ease virtually all remaining COVID-19 safety rules in the city in the coming days, signaling a big step toward normalcy in the city after almost two years of lock downs and restrictions.

Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole hesitated to say COVID had reached an endemic stage, but acknowledged that Wednesday’s announcement marked a new stage in the pandemic.

“I think talking about regaining as much normal life as we can … is better framing for me,” she said. “I’m hoping we have enough immunity in the city that we really are at an end point.”

Philadelphia was the only place in the state still maintaining a general indoor-masking requirement.

There’s more at the original, but it sure sounds to me like Commissioner Bettigole didn’t approve of the decision, but was overruled by Mayor Jim Kenney.

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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.