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Fauci Is Put on Notice, Told to Preserve Records for Major Free Speech Lawsuit + More
Fauci Is Put on Notice, Told to Preserve Records for Major Free Speech Lawsuit
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) non-profit has sent a letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci and several medical and other U.S. officials, as well as to Google, making sure they are formally notified of their obligations to preserve communications records. The records in question are relevant to a major First Amendment case alleging collusion between the government and tech companies, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), which is currently in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The NCLA letter specified that the request pertains to all documents and electronically stored information, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34. Those named in the letter are former chief medical adviser to President Biden Dr. Anthony Fauci, his colleague from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (that Fauci headed during the pandemic) Dr. David Morens, Adam Kirschner of the U.S. State Department, and Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado, among others.
The letter recalled that Fauci is a defendant in the landmark First Amendment case, alleging that he and other government officials named in Murthy v. Missouri — including the president himself — engaged in unconstitutional censorship of social media around COVID issues such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines.
NCLA has joined the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri and is now in that capacity requesting that Fauci, Morens, and others preserve all documents, including drafts and copies, and paper files maintained by their staff that are relevant to the case.
Washington Parental Rights Law Criticized as a ‘Forced Outing’ Measure Is Allowed to Take Effect
A new Washington state parental rights law derided by critics as a “forced outing” measure will be allowed to take effect this week after a court commissioner on Tuesday declined to issue an emergency order temporarily blocking it.
The civil liberties groups, school district, youth services organizations and others who are challenging the law did not show that it would create the kind of imminent harm necessary to warrant blocking it until a trial court judge can consider the matter, King County Superior Court Commissioner Mark Hillman said. A hearing before the judge is scheduled for June 21.
The law, known as Initiative 2081, underscores, and in some cases expands, the rights already granted to parents under state and federal law. It requires schools to notify parents in advance of medical services offered to their child, except in emergencies, and of medical treatment arranged by the school resulting in follow-up care beyond normal hours. It grants parents the right to review their child’s medical and counseling records and expands cases where parents can opt their child out of sex education.
How Internet Addiction May Affect Your Teen’s Brain, According to a New Study
Teens who spend lots of time on social media have complained of feeling like they can’t pay attention to more important things like homework or time with loved ones.
A new study has possibly captured that objectively, finding that for teens diagnosed with internet addiction, signaling between brain regions important for controlling attention, working memory and more was disrupted.
The findings are from a review, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Mental Health, of 12 neuroimaging studies of a few hundred adolescents ages 10 to 19 between 2013 and 2022.
“The behavioral addiction brought on by excessive internet use has become a rising source of concern since the last decade,” the authors wrote in the study.
Google’s Hidden Logs Detail Thousands of Privacy Breaches
Call them mistakes, mishaps or reckless, a pattern of serious privacy breaches has been leaked from the big tech giant according to Google employee reports. In an era where data is as precious as gold, even giants like Google are not immune to pitfalls in handling the vast reservoirs of personal information flowing through their systems.
A six-year span of internal Google reports, unearthed by 404 Media, exposes a troubling array of privacy breaches affecting everything from children’s voice data to the home addresses of unsuspecting carpool users.
Another significant breach involved the exposure of email addresses from over a million users of Socratic.org, an educational platform Google had acquired.
This breach, which left sensitive data like geolocation information and IP addresses accessible via the platform’s page source, lingered undetected for more than a year, affecting numerous users, including children.
Americans Need COVID Closure. Congress Just Blew Its Chance.
Congress blew its chance Monday to give Americans some insight into the COVID pandemic that has dominated our lives for years. Following a 15-month inquiry, Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic called Anthony Fauci to testify in public at a special hearing, but committee members spent most of the time posturing rather than probing the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Many of us still want to know why the U.S. had more burdensome restrictions yet still lost more people, per capita, than other countries. We still want a coherent, honest explanation for how the pandemic started. Some thoughtful scientists have suggested a bipartisan investigation similar to the 9/11 Commission to give Americans the answers we deserve. Yet yesterday, representatives from both parties showed no curiosity, either for themselves or for the American people.
Fauci was also evasive on questions about vaccine mandates when he repeated that “vaccines save lives” — a statement that’s true but irrelevant. Some cancer screenings and drugs “save lives” but we don’t force people to get them. He did admit that at first, the vaccines seemed to prevent transmission but that scientists’ understanding changed as the virus evolved and as vaccines’ protection waned.
Fauci’s Testimony Reverberates in Florida
The hearing served as a reminder of how Florida, under Gov. Ron DeSantis, essentially ignored Dr. Anthony Fauci’s advice. Down ballot, it’ll provide fodder to Republicans who will boast about DeSantis’ approach as they try to win over the support of voters, reminding many transplants why they rebuilt their lives here in the first place.
“There was no science,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who’s considering running for Florida governor in two years, wrote in a post on X about Fauci saying the six-feet social distancing recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t based on clinical trials. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) praised colleagues for “holding Dr. Fauci accountable.”
Fauci has been one of DeSantis’ favorite boogeymen. His gubernatorial reelection campaign sold “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merch and the governor often boasts that he prevented Florida from becoming a “Faucian dystopia.”
When he ran for president he promised to bring a “reckoning” to Fauci over his handling of the pandemic. Though DeSantis lost the GOP nomination, a Florida grand jury is still looking into the COVID vaccine and its manufacturers, and already criticized forced masking and lockdowns.
100,000 Models Show That Not Much Was Learned About Stopping the COVID Pandemic
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and public health institutions made bold claims about the effectiveness of various policy responses such as closing schools and banning public gatherings. These claims shaped government responses and had enormous effects on the lives of billions of people around the world. Are those claims supported by data?
To answer that question, we explored whether patterns in the epidemiologic data could support claims made in the scientific literature and by public health institutions about the effectiveness of policy responses to COVID-19.
We were optimistic we would find some policies that were consistently helpful. We thought the data would show that early shelter-in-place containment measures in the spring of 2020 were more effective in preventing deaths than those later in the pandemic, or that case numbers would not rise after restrictions on attending schools were lifted. That isn’t what we found, as we describe in a paper published today in Science Advances.
Looking at stay-at-home policies and school closures, about half the time it looked like COVID-19 outcomes improved after their imposition, and half the time they got worse. Every policy, COVID-19 outcome, time period, and modeling approach yielded a similar level of uncertainty: about half the time it looked like things got better, and half the time like things got worse.
Yet scientists used these data to make definitive conclusions.
Google to Start Permanently Deleting Users’ Location History
Google will delete everything it knows about users’ previously visited locations, the company has said, a year after it committed to reducing the amount of personal data it stores about users.
The company’s “timeline” feature — previously known as Location History — will still work for those who choose to use it, letting them scroll back through potentially decades of travel history to check where they were at a specific time.
But all the data required to make the feature work will be saved locally, to their own phones or tablets, with none of it being stored on the company’s servers.
Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech
In 1984, George Orwell coined the term thoughtcrime. In the short story “The Minority Report,” the science-fiction author Philip K. Dick gave us the concept of “precrime,” describing a society where would-be criminals were arrested before they could act.
Now Canada is combining the concepts in a work of dystopian nonfiction: A bill making its way through Parliament would impose draconian criminal penalties on hate speech and curtail people’s liberty in order to stop future crimes they haven’t yet committed.
The Online Harms Act states that any person who advocates for or promotes genocide is “liable to imprisonment for life.” It defines lesser “hate crimes” as including online speech that is “likely to foment detestation or vilification” on the basis of race, religion, gender, or other protected categories. And if someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”
A recognizance is no mere promise to refrain from committing hate crimes. The judge may put the defendant under house arrest or electronic surveillance and order them to abstain from alcohol and drugs. Refusal to “enter the recognizance” for one-year results in 12 months in prison.
This is madness.
Los Angeles Could End COVID Vaccination Rule for City Employees + More
Los Angeles Could End COVID Vaccination Rule for City Employees
Los Angeles could soon end its requirement for city employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. City officials are recommending that the Los Angeles City Council halt the requirement as soon as early June, according to a newly released report. The COVID vaccination rule was first approved by city leaders nearly three years ago as public health officials urged vaccination to protect people from the coronavirus.
In a report, City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo noted that other local government agencies — including the cities of Long Beach and San Diego and Los Angeles County — had stopped requiring COVID vaccination as a condition of employment. Szabo said L.A. employee groups had not opposed ending the requirement.
If city leaders approve ending the requirements, employees who resigned or were terminated because of the vaccination rule may be eligible to be rehired in the same positions as before. Eighty-six city workers were terminated under the rule, Szabo said; it is unclear how many employees resigned over the COVID vaccination requirement because they do not have to report their reasons.
Los Angeles has faced numerous lawsuits over its COVID vaccination rule. In one of the latest suits, filed last week in federal court, a woman formerly employed as a city accountant said she was denied a religious exemption from the vaccination requirement and ultimately discharged from her position. She accused the city of discrimination, saying it had ignored its policy of “accommodating sincerely held religious beliefs.”
The Death of Western Values — Surveillance, Conformity, and the Post-9/11 State
The West once prided itself on being the bastion of freedom, a place where the individual’s rights and liberties were sacrosanct, where various viewpoints weren’t just tolerated but encouraged. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, however, ushered in an era of unprecedented state surveillance, governmental overreach, and a pervasive culture of ideological conformity that would have appalled the very architects of Western democracy.
The enactment of the Patriot Act was ostensibly a necessary response to the terror that had just been unleashed upon American soil. However, it marked the beginning of a slow but steady erosion of civil liberties in the name of national security. The state, empowered by this draconian legislation, granted itself the authority to spy on its citizens, to delve into their private communications without due process, and to create vast databases of personal information, all under the pretext of safeguarding the homeland.
Surveillance became the new norm. The revelations by whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the government’s intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens. The National Security Agency’s (NSA) metadata collection program, indiscriminately swept up information about billions of phone calls, effectively making every citizen a suspect in a never-ending hunt for the invisible enemy. This omnipresent surveillance apparatus has done little to enhance security but has significantly curtailed the freedoms that were once taken for granted.
The collusion between Big Tech and the government is not merely a matter of convenience, but a strategic alliance aimed at controlling the narrative and maintaining order. This unholy alliance ensures that any challenge to the status quo, be it political, social, or ideological, is swiftly neutralized. The algorithms designed to connect us now serve to divide and manipulate, creating echo chambers where conformity is enforced, and deviation is punished.
In the Pandemic, We Were Told to Keep 6 Feet Apart. There’s No Science to Support That.
The nation’s top mental health official had spent months asking for evidence behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines, warning that keeping Americans physically apart during the coronavirus pandemic would harm patients, businesses, and overall health and wellness.
Now, Elinore McCance-Katz, the Trump administration’s assistant secretary for mental health and substance use, was urging the CDC to justify its recommendation that Americans stay six feet apart to avoid contracting COVID-19 — or get rid of it.
“It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” Anthony S. Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”
Four years later, visible reminders of the six-foot rule remain with us, particularly in cities that rushed to adopt the CDC’s guidelines hoping to protect residents and keep businesses open. D.C. is dotted with signs in stores and schools — even on sidewalks or in government buildings — urging people to stand six feet apart.
Perhaps the rule’s biggest impact was on children, despite ample evidence they were at relatively low risk of COVID-related complications. Many schools were unable to accommodate six feet of space between students’ desks and forced to rely on virtual education for more than a year, said Joseph Allen, a Harvard University expert in environmental health, who called in 2020 for schools to adopt three feet of social distance.
What to Know About ‘Open Banking,’ Coming Soon in the U.S.
The banking industry took its time to transition from paper bills to plastic cards. Now it’s in the midst of a more rapid transformation: going digital.
“Open banking” allows anyone to share data from their financial accounts with third parties, like merchants, financial tech companies, or rival banks. For customers, it creates a way to easily compare bank offerings, transfer their bank accounts, and get an overview of their finances. (If you’ve ever been prompted to give another app access to your bank, then you’ve already used open banking.)
It’s also a way for banks — and merchant partners — to leverage large stores of data to boost their revenues and expand their offerings.
New York Set to Restrict Social Media Algorithms for Teens, WSJ Reports
New York is planning to prohibit social media companies from using algorithms to control content to youth without parental consent under a tentative agreement reached by state lawmakers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Social media platforms have in recent years come under scrutiny for their addictive nature and impact on the youth.
The bill, which is still being finalized but expected to be voted on this week, would also prohibit platforms from sending minors notifications during overnight hours without parental consent, the WSJ said.
Meta to Settle Texas Lawsuit Over Facebook Facial Recognition Data
Meta’s Facebook (META.O) has agreed to settle a lawsuit by the state of Texas that accused the social media giant of illegally using facial-recognition technology to collect biometric data of millions of Texans without their consent.
Meta and Texas said in a court filing in Texas state court on Friday that they have agreed in principle to resolve the lawsuit, filed in 2022.
They asked a judge to pause the case for 30 days to allow the sides to finish the deal and present it to the court. The filing did not spell out the terms of the settlement.
Advocacy Group Accuses Microsoft of Shifting Child Data Role Onto Schools
Microsoft (MSFT.O) is shifting its responsibilities for children’s personal data onto schools that are not equipped to cope, advocacy group NOYB alleges in one of two complaints filed to Austria’s privacy watchdog.
The complaints against Microsoft’s online education software are the latest grievances leveled against the U.S. tech giant by rivals and campaigners. Online educational programs gained in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic as schools switched to remote teaching and students became online learners.
NOYB’s (None of your business) gripes center on Microsoft’s 365 Education suite of software programs for students that include Word, Excel, Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint and Outlook. In its first complaint, the advocacy group alleges Microsoft shifts its responsibility as a data controller required to process users’ personal data under EU privacy rules known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to schools, that do not hold the necessary data.
“This is nothing more but an attempt to shift the responsibility for children’s data as far away from Microsoft as possible,” NOYB lawyer Maartje de Graaf said.
After Grilling an NIH Scientist Over COVID Emails, Congress Turns to Anthony Fauci + More
After Grilling an NIH Scientist Over COVID Emails, Congress Turns to Anthony Fauci
Former National Institutes of Health official Anthony Fauci has faced many hostile questions from members of Congress, but when he appears before a House panel on Monday, he’ll have something new to answer for: a trove of incendiary emails written by one of his closest advisers.
In the emails, David Morens, a career federal scientist now on administrative leave, described deleting messages and using a personal email account to evade disclosure of correspondence under the Freedom of Information Act. “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
The pressure is on as Fauci himself prepares to appear on June 3 before a House subcommittee exploring the origins of COVID-19. The NIH, a $49 billion agency that is the foremost source of funding in the world for biomedical research, finds itself under unusual bipartisan scrutiny. The subcommittee has demanded more outside oversight of NIH and its 50,000 grants and raised the idea of term limits for officials like Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an NIH component, from 1984 to 2022.
In a May 28 letter to NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli, the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), said the evidence “suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The Era of ChatGPT-Powered Propaganda Is Upon Us
China, Iran, Russia, and others are using OpenAI tools for covert influence operations, according to the company. In a blog post on Thursday, OpenAI said it’s been quick to react, disrupting five operations in the last three months that had tried to manipulate public opinion and sway political outcomes through deception.
The operations OpenAI shut down harnessed AI to generate comments and articles in different languages, make up names and bios for fake social media accounts, debug code, and more.
OpenAI continues to flex its commitment to safety and transparency, but not everyone is buying it. Some have argued, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself, that highly advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.
Stuart Russell, a leading AI researcher and a pioneer of the technology, previously told Business Insider that he thinks Altman is building out the technology before figuring out how to make it safe — and called that “completely unacceptable.”
Momentum Grows for Total Ban on Phones in Schools
New York Governor Kathy Hochul is planning to introduce a bill banning smartphones in schools, the latest high-profile effort in a national push to improve online safety, mental health and academic performance for children. “I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, making them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction, and normal classroom activity,” Hochul told the Guardian newspaper in an interview Thursday.
The governor plans to officially bring up the bill later this year, aiming for it to be addressed in New York’s next legislative session starting in January. If passed, students would be permitted only to carry simple “flip phones” capable of texting but without internet access.
The movement to regulate children’s online activity — at least while they’re in school — is gaining traction nationwide. New York’s proposed bill, part of a broader campaign by the governor to tackle mental health, includes two other bills aimed at safeguarding children’s privacy online and limiting their access to certain social network features.
States like Florida have passed strict rules banning student cellphone use and blocking social media during class, with some districts extending the ban to the entire school day. Other states, including Minnesota, Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, South Carolina and Nevada, have proposed similar bills. Maryland and Vermont passed their “Kids Code” bills earlier this year despite opposition from social media companies.
New Mexico Judge Grants Mark Zuckerberg’s Request to Be Dropped From Child Safety Lawsuit
A New Mexico judge on Thursday granted Mark Zuckerberg’s request to be dropped from a lawsuit that alleges his company has failed to protect young users on its social media platforms from sexual exploitation.
The case is one of many filed by states, school districts and parents against Meta and its platforms over concerns about child exploitation. Beyond courtrooms around the U.S., the issue has been a topic of congressional hearings as lawmakers and parents are growing increasingly concerned about the effects of social media on young people’s lives.
In New Mexico, Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta and Zuckerberg late last year following an undercover online investigation.
While granting Zuckerberg’s request, Judge Bryan Biedscheid dismissed Meta’s motion seeking to dismiss the state’s claims, marking what Torrez described as a crucial step for the case to proceed against the social media giant.
As for Zuckerberg, Biedscheid said he wasn’t persuaded by the state’s arguments that the executive should remain a party to the New Mexico lawsuit, but he noted that could change depending on what evidence is presented as the case against Meta proceeds.
Mastercard’s Controversial Digital ID Rollout in Africa
The purpose of Community Pass is to enable a digital ID and wallet that’s contained in a “smart card.” Launched four years ago, the program — which Mastercard says, in addition to being based on digital ID, is interoperable, and works offline — targets “underserved communities” and currently has 3.5 million users, with plans of growing that number to 30 million by 2027.
According to a map on Mastercard’s site, this program is now being either piloted or has been rolled out in India, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Mauritania, while the latest announcement is the partnership with the African Development Bank Group in an initiative dubbed, Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy (MADE).
The plan is to, over ten years, make sure 100 million people and businesses in Africa are included in digital ID programs and thus allow access to government and “humanitarian” services.
Given how controversial digital ID schemes are, and how much pushback they encounter in developed countries, it’s hard to shake off the impression that such initiatives are pushed so aggressively in economically disadvantaged areas and communities precisely because little opposition is expected.
Former TIAA Employees Sue Over Termination and Denial of Religious Exemption to COVID Vaccine Mandates
The Carolina Journal reported:
Former employees of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America are suing their former employer over being terminated from their jobs after failing to comply with the company’s COVID-era vaccine mandate.
The plaintiffs have filed suit against TIAA, a financial retirement service company with locations in North Carolina, alleging violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act among other complaints.
Plaintiff Noelle Sproul worked as an attorney in TIAA’s legal department for several years before being terminated on May 2, 2022. She was also appointed as a managing director in the legal department of Nuveen LLC, a subsidiary of TIAA.
TIAA issued a mandate in 2021 for all employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In the months subsequent to the mandate, Sproul submitted exemptions for both medical disability and for an exemption on the grounds of religious accommodation pursuant to TIAA policy. Appeals of the exemptions were later denied.
Congress’s Online Child Safety Bill, Explained
It’s tough to feel an urgency about something that progresses in slow motion. Bear with me, though, because it is time, once again, to care about the Kids’ Online Safety Act, otherwise known as KOSA, a federal bill that was designed to protect children from online harms.
The bill has been hanging around in Congress in some form since 2022 when Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced their bipartisan response to a series of congressional hearings and investigations into online child safety. While KOSA’s specific provisions have changed in the years since the central goal of the legislation remains the same: legislators want to make platforms more responsible for the well-being of kids who use their services and provide tools to parents so that they can manage how younger people use the internet.
The dangers posed to minors by the internet have long been simultaneously a real threat and a moral panic. It’s a political issue that has bipartisan support, while also appearing to be extremely difficult to govern without infringing on First Amendment protections.
Nvidia Set to Overtake Apple as World’s Second-Most Valuable Company
Nvidia (NVDA.O) could soon surpass Apple to become the world’s second-most valuable company, as the kingmaker behind the AI revolution takes on the iPhone maker that has ruled Wall Street for decades.
The reliance of virtually all artificial intelligence applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT on Nvidia’s high-end chips has helped the stock nearly triple in value over the past year to $2.72 trillion.
Financial Surveillance? PayPal Plots Ad Network Built Off Your Purchase History and Shopping Habits + More
Financial Surveillance? PayPal Plots Ad Network Built Off Your Purchase History and Shopping Habits
PayPal has announced that it is creating an ad platform “powered” by the data the payment service giant has from millions of both customers and merchants — specifically, from their transaction information.
The data harvesting here will be on by default, but PayPal users (Venmo is included in the scheme) will be able to opt out of what some critics refer to as yet another example of “financial surveillance.” The company’s massive business in the first quarter of this year alone amounted to 6.5 transactions processed for 427 million customers.
In this way, PayPal is joining others who are turning to using customer data to monetize targeted advertising. In the company’s industry, Visa and JPMorgan Chase have been making similar moves, while big retailers “share” this type of data with Big Tech.
Germany Scraps a COVID Vaccination Requirement for Military Servicepeople
Germany has scrapped a requirement for its military servicepeople to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a mandate that had been in place since late 2021, the government said Wednesday.
People serving with the German military, the Bundeswehr, are required to get vaccinations against a number of diseases — including measles, mumps and flu — so long as individuals have no specific health issues to prevent that.
COVID-19 was added to the list in November 2021, meaning that anyone who refused to get vaccinated against it could face disciplinary measures.
Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has now dropped the COVID-19 requirement following recommendations from the Bundeswehr’s chief medical officer and a military medical advisory committee, ministry spokesperson Mitko Müller said. It has been replaced by a strong recommendation to get the vaccine.
Another Pandemic Is ‘Absolutely Inevitable’, Says Patrick Vallance
The former chief scientific adviser to the government Sir Patrick Vallance has said another pandemic is “absolutely inevitable” and urged the incoming British government to focus on preparing for it, warning “We are not ready yet.”
Speaking at a panel event at the Hay Festival in Powys, Vallance said it is “great we are having an election” as there are “clearly issues that need to be sorted out”. One of the things the next government must do is implement “better surveillance to be able to pick these things up,” he said.
He also reiterated what he said to G7 leaders in 2021, that “we need to be much faster, much more aligned — and there are ways to do this — at getting rapid diagnostic tests, rapid vaccines, rapid treatments, so that you don’t have to go into the extreme measures that took place” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The measures he recommends are possible to implement, Vallance believes, but “require some coordination.”
He mentioned the World Health Organization’s push for the pandemic accord, a proposed agreement for countries to work together to prepare for pandemics, as one of the “steps in the right direction” that are being taken. “But I don’t think there’s enough focus,” he said. If this issue gets pushed off G7 and G20 agendas, “we’ll be in exactly the same position, and I hope that’s an important outcome of the inquiry.”
Uganda Tackles Yellow Fever With New Travel Requirement, Vaccination Campaign for Millions
Uganda has rolled out a nationwide yellow fever vaccination campaign to help safeguard its population against the mosquito-borne disease that has long posed a threat.
By the end of April, Ugandan authorities had vaccinated 12.2 million of the 14 million people targeted, said Dr. Michael Baganizi, an official in charge of immunization at the health ministry.
Uganda will now require everyone traveling to and from the country to have a yellow fever vaccination card as an international health regulation, Baganizi said.
Ugandan authorities hope the requirement will compel more people to get the yellow fever shot amid a general atmosphere of vaccine hesitancy that worries healthcare providers in the East African nation.
Mayo Clinic Must Face Religious Bias Claims Over COVID Vaccine Policy, Court Rules
A U.S. appeals court on Friday revived a lawsuit accusing the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota of illegally firing five employees who refused on religious grounds to receive the COVID-19 vaccine or be regularly tested for the virus.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the judge who tossed out the consolidated lawsuits last year wrongly ruled that the workers had not connected their objections to Mayo’s COVID-19 policies with sincere Christian religious beliefs.
Three of the workers were fired for refusing the vaccine and two others who received religious exemptions were terminated for declining weekly COVID-19 testing. They claimed that their refusal stemmed from the belief that their bodies are temples and from their objections to the use of fetal cells in the production of vaccines.
“The district court erred by emphasizing that many Christians elect to receive the vaccine,” U.S. Circuit Judge Duane Benton wrote. “Beliefs do not have to be uniform across all members of a religion or acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others.”
A Lawsuit Claims a Palm Beach County Health Network Shared Patient Info With Meta
A recent lawsuit alleges Palm Beach Health Network shared “highly sensitive personal information” with Facebook’s parent company, Meta, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The health network is accused of sharing code from its website with the company, allowing Facebook to target patients with personalized ads based on sensitive information.
The lawsuit alleges Palm Beach Health Network installed Facebook’s Meta Pixel and other invisible third-party tracking technology on its websites to intercept patients’ information “with the express purpose” of disclosing the information.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach. The lead plaintiff alleges that he started seeing ads on Facebook about his “particular medical conditions and treatments.” after he used the Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center website and patient portal.
Massachusetts Shelled Out Nearly $400K for Vaccine Record Checks in State-Run Shelters
State officials have pumped nearly $400,000 into a program to review the vaccine records of families entering the emergency shelter system, including migrants from other countries who may have foreign documentation, according to the Healey administration.
Officials at Boston-based John Snow, Inc., which has long worked with the state, have been contracted to review immunization documents. Since January, more than 1,200 children in state-run shelters have had their records checked, according to the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, or HHS.
Vaccine record checks have occurred since September 2023 but the cost surfaced in a bi-weekly report on the shelter system released Monday, which said $381,000 has been shuttled to the program.
The Department of Public Health has run “catch-up vaccination clinics” through the winter and spring for families to receive vaccinations. State officials have handed out over 4,000 vaccinations at the clinics since January, according to the state.
Millions of U.S. Customers Have Social Security Numbers Stolen in Major Sav-Rx Data Breach
The hackers that hit Sav-Rx late in 2023 made away with sensitive data on more than 2.8 million people in the United States, the company has confirmed in a filing with the Maine Attorney General.
Sav-Rx is a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), a company that provides prescription drug benefit services to various organizations such as unions, employers, and health plans. Its work includes the management and facilitation of prescription medication delivery, negotiations with drug manufacturers and pharmacies regarding prices, and more.
The data that was exposed in this incident includes people’s full names, birth dates, Social Security Numbers (SSN), email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, eligibility data, and insurance identification numbers. While it’s commendable that clinical data was not accessed, the type of information stolen is more than enough for any hacking group to use in identity theft, phishing, or social engineering attacks.