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The COVID Vaccine Mandate for Military Members Might Be the Next One to Fall
The question of the day is whether Congress will end a coronavirus vaccine mandate imposed on military service members as part of a roughly $800 billion bill to reauthorize the Pentagon, known as the National Defense Authorization Act (or NDAA).
Top leaders huddled yesterday as they hashed out an array of certain provisions of the legislation, though there are still unresolved issues. One person with knowledge of the NDAA, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the fluid legislation, said the bill as currently written directs the defense secretary to end the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for activity duty and reserve component service members.
But that doesn’t appear final. The vaccine mandate is one of the items still under discussion, two congressional aides, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid, said last night.
Late last week, over a dozen Senate Republicans warned they would drag out consideration of the defense policy bill if they didn’t secure a vote on ending the military’s vaccine mandate.
U.S. Intelligence Chief: Parents ‘Should Be’ Concerned for Kids’ Privacy on TikTok
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines is warning parents about risks to their children’s data privacy on the social media platform TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell at the Reagan National Defense Forum, Haines said it is “extraordinary” how adept the Chinese government is at “collecting foreign data.”
“And their capacity to then turn around and use it, to target audiences for information campaigns but also to have it for the future to use it for a variety of means,” she said.
When Mitchell asked if parents should be worried, Haines responded, “I think you should be.” TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms in the U.S., with tens of millions of users. The video-sharing app is particularly popular among younger generations, fueling concerns about data collection from Beijing.
Fauci Deputy Was ‘Very Impressed’ With China’s COVID Lockdown Methods, Despite ‘Great Cost’
Dr. Anthony Fauci testified last week that his deputy at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Clifford Lane, was “very impressed” with how China was managing the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and said that the country “has demonstrated this infection can be controlled, albeit at great cost.”
Fauci was deposed under oath by state GOP attorneys general Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry as part of their lawsuit against the Biden administration. The two AGs have accused top-ranking government officials of working with Twitter, YouTube and Meta, which owns Facebook, “under the guise of combating misinformation” in order to censor viewpoints on COVID that went against the Biden administration’s position.
According to the transcript of the deposition released on Monday by Schmitt, Fauci said that Lane took note of China’s “extreme” measures to combat the virus. Fauci said he believes that he recommended that Lane travel to China with the World Health Organization (WHO) to investigate the virus in February 2020.
“Dr. Lane was very impressed about how, from a clinical public health standpoint, the Chinese were handling the isolation, the contact tracing, the building of facilities to take care of people and that’s what I believed he meant when he said [they] were managing this in a very structured, organized way,” Fauci said.
CDC Encourages People to Wear Masks to Help Prevent Spread of COVID, Flu and RSV Over the Holidays
The Centers for Disease Control Prevention on Monday encouraged people to wear masks to help reduce the spread of respiratory illnesses this season as COVID, flu and RSV circulate at the same time.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, in a call with reporters, said wearing a mask is one of several everyday precautions that people can take to reduce their chances of catching or spreading a respiratory virus during the busy holiday season.
The CDC director said the agency is considering expanding its system of COVID community levels to take into account other respiratory viruses such as the flu. The system is the basis for when CDC advises the public to wear masks. But Walensky encouraged people to take proactive action.
Most Americans Support Elon Musk’s Efforts to Make Twitter ‘More Free and Transparent’: Poll
A significant portion of American citizens is supportive of industrialist Elon Musk’s efforts to ensure freedom of speech on Twitter, according to a poll by Trafalgar Group.
The poll asked respondents whether they support Musk seeking to make Twitter a “more free and transparent platform.” According to the survey, 52.3% responded positively, while 31.3% were not supportive of Musk’s actions at Twitter. The remaining 16.3% were “not sure.” Without the “not sure” option, support for Musk jumped to 62.6%, while those against such changes only made up 37.4%.
Amazon Is Offering Customers $2 per Month for Letting the Company Monitor the Traffic on Their Phones
Some Amazon users will now earn $2 dollar per month for agreeing to share their traffic data with the retail giant. Under the company’s new invite-only Ad Verification program, Amazon is tracking what ads participants saw, where they saw them and the time of day they were viewed. This includes Amazon’s own ads and third-party ads on the platform.
The Ad Verification program — currently limited to U.S. and U.K.-based Amazon customers — was launched in the wake of concerns from privacy advocates over how Amazon handles sensitive user data. Earlier this month, Wired reported that experts were anxious about how Amazon would handle the data it obtained through healthcare startup OneMedical. And there have long been concerns over how the company uses the data from its smart home devices like Alexa and Ring, CNBC reported.
Exchanging user data for a financial reward is nothing new. In 2016, Facebook launched a program that gave monthly $20 gift cards to users between the ages of 13 and 25 if they installed Facebook Research, a VPN app that tracked their online activity for market research, TechCrunch reported.
In 2012, Google launched Screenwise, a program that gave volunteer users $5 Amazon gift cards — with additional ones every three months for up to a year — to download a Google Chrome browser extension that tracked what they did on the internet, Ars Technica reported. Both the Facebook and Google programs were shut down in 2019 due to privacy concerns, The Verge and TechCrunch reported.
Meta’s Oversight Board Finds Cross-Check Puts ‘Business Concerns’ Ahead of Human Rights
More than a year after Meta asked the Oversight Board to weigh in on its cross-check rules, the group has finally published its full policy advisory on the topic. The board found that the program, which creates a separate content moderation process for certain high-profile users, prioritizes the company’s business over the rights of its users.
“In our review, we found several shortcomings in Meta’s cross-check program,” the board writes in its assessment. “While Meta told the Board that cross-check aims to advance Meta’s human rights commitments, we found that the program appears more directly structured to satisfy business concerns.” Notably, the critique echoes that of whistleblower Frances Haugen, who revealed explosive details about cross-check last year, and has said that Meta “chooses profits over safety.”
Cross-check, or xcheck, is an internal program at Facebook and Instagram that shields celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users from the company’s automated content moderation systems. Meta has characterized it as a “second layer of review” to avoid mistakenly removing posts. But disclosures made by Haugen showed the program includes millions of accounts and has enabled billions of views on posts that would have otherwise been taken down.
‘A Clear and Present Danger to Its Users:’ South Carolina Gov. Bans State Employees From Using TikTok Amid National Security Concerns
South Carolina became the second state in the union Monday to permanently ban state employees’ electronic devices from using TikTok amid federal officials sounding the alarm that the Chinese-based social media app threatens national security.
Growing security concerns over the social media platform have caught lawmakers’ attention recently after the Federal Communications Commission said the government agency could not regulate the social media app or control American data from flowing back to Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who requires companies to share its data upon request under the country’s 2017 National Intelligence Law.
Heeding warning signs from federal officials, Governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina took action against state employees, alleging the app poses “a clear and present danger to its users,” as a growing bi-partisan coalition in Congress continues to push for a national ban on TikTok.
‘Troubling’ Study Finds Google’s Kidney Disease-Predicting AI Performs Worse in Women — and May Not Have a Quick Fix
Acute kidney failure is a common condition among people who have already been hospitalized with another critical condition. It develops rapidly, over the span of just a few days, and if left untreated can lead to permanent kidney damage or death.
That’s why Google’s DeepMind division and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs were met with such excitement in 2019 when they unveiled an artificial intelligence system that had been proven in a study to help predict the presence of acute kidney injury up to two days in advance.
But another study published this month has found that the AI not only is less effective when applied to female patients but also may not be easily fixed simply by adjusting its sample size and gender representation. The DeepMind and VA researchers acknowledged this potential issue in the original study: “Female patients comprised 6.38% of patients in the dataset, and model performance was lower for this demographic,” they wrote at the time, though their findings were limited only to patients in the earlier stages of acute kidney failure.
The more recent analysis of the deep learning AI — which was led by researchers from the University of Michigan — expanded on those findings, concluding that the model incorrectly identified female patients across all levels of acute kidney injury severity.
Beijing Drops COVID Testing Burden as Wider Easing Beckons
Residents of China’s capital were allowed into parks, supermarkets, offices and airports without a negative COVID-19 test on Tuesday, the latest in a mix of easing steps nationwide after unprecedented protests against a tough zero-COVID policy.
“Beijing readies itself for life again,” read a headline in the government-owned China Daily newspaper, adding that people were “gradually embracing” newfound freedoms.
Authorities have been loosening some of the world’s toughest COVID curbs to varying degrees and softening their tone on the threat of the virus, in what many hope could herald a more pronounced shift towards normalcy three years into the pandemic.
Both of the city’s airports also no longer require people to test to enter the terminal, state media reported, although there was no indication of a change to the rule for a negative test before boarding a flight.
