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Fauci Now Says Americans Should Get to Choose if They Want to Take the COVID Vaccine
New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show COVID-19 cases are again rising in some parts of the country. Despite this, there is little talk of reinstating the various draconian measures the government used to enforce compliance from 2020 to 2022. Indeed, even Dr. Anthony Fauci is singing a different tune.
Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is now a professor at Georgetown University. But the man who was the architect of the government’s pandemic response still occasionally moonlights as a pundit on the television circuit, and in recent months, Fauci’s policy prescriptions have taken a stark turn.
While speaking to ABC’s Jonathan Karl on This Week earlier this fall, Fauci was asked who should be taking the new COVID booster. “I believe we should give the choice to people that are not in the high-risk groups, to have the vaccine available for them,” Fauci replied.
Choice is the keyword here. It’s a stark contrast to Fauci’s previous support of the White House’s vaccine mandate that required private companies to demand vaccination as a condition of employment.
It’s a stunning reversal. Fauci is now using words such as “choice” and “recommend” in relation to vaccines — even for high-risk people. Talking points about the efficacy of mandates have vanished (including mask mandates).
FDNY Veteran Says Heart Damage From Required COVID Vax Forced Early Retirement
An FDNY firefighter says he was forced to retire on half his salary after the city-mandated COVID-19 vaccine left him with permanent heart damage.
O’Brian Pastrana now wants a judge to award him a more lucrative disability pension, which would pay three-quarters of his final salary tax-free, according to court papers.
Pastrana, 37, got the jab in October 2021 because the city required it, and had an immediate allergic reaction, including swollen lips, chills and body aches. Despite three trips to the emergency room, he claims he was forced to get the second Pfizer shot a month later. “I thought I was going to die after that second dose,” Pastrana told The Post, adding he was again rushed to the ER after the second shot.
By February 2022, the married father of two was diagnosed with myocarditis, which results in potentially fatal inflammation of the cardiac muscle, and was nearly in heart failure, court records show. Pastrana was then told he could never be a firefighter again, and forced to retire in March after over a decade on the job.
33 States Accuse Meta of Having a Big ‘Open Secret’ — Millions of Underage Users
Meta knowingly has millions of users under the age of 13 on Instagram and “zealously” protects that information from being disclosed to the public, newly unredacted court documents show, per The New York Times.
An initial, redacted version of the complaint, which was filed in October, accused Meta of “intentionally” designing “its flagship social media platforms, especially Instagram, to be addictive to youth.” An unredacted version that was filed earlier this week by 33 states also accuses Meta of knowing about millions of under-13-year-olds using Instagram, in violation of its general age policy.
The complaint alleges that “Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed,” The NYT reported. The company had reportedly closed “only a fraction” of those accounts.
The complaint also claims that Instagram actively “coveted and pursued” underage users and that Meta “routinely continued to collect” children’s personal information, including their email addresses and locations. Under U.S. law, it is illegal for companies to collect data on children under the age of 13, and each individual violation is subject to fines of up to $50,120. If proven that Meta knew about millions of underage accounts and did not take action to close them, they could be facing unprecedented fines.
New iPhone Update With ‘Name Drop’ Sparks Privacy Warning: ‘Help Keep Your Kids Safe’
Have you, or your kids, downloaded the latest iOS update for iPhone? Well, local police say you may want to change a new feature.
It’s called “NameDrop,” and it’s automatically enabled with the iOS 17 update pushed out to iPhone users over the past week or so.
The feature allows your contact information to be shared with anyone who places their phone next to yours. Shared information may include phone numbers, photos, email addresses and more.
Local police are urging parents to make sure the feature is disabled on their children’s phones.
Senator Presses Army Over Backpay, Religious Freedoms for Soldiers Discharged for COVID Vaccine Refusal
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., is pressing the U.S. Army for answers on behalf of former service members who were discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Nearly 2,000 service members were let go from the military after refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Amid recruitment troubles in 2023, the Army recently sent a letter to the discharged soldiers, telling them they have the option to correct their characterization of discharge and rejoin the branch. The Army has said the letters were part of a congressionally mandated process.
In a letter to Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth on Tuesday, Schmitt asked whether any soldiers would receive backpay if they decide to re-enlist if they would be reinstated to their rank held before discharge, and whether the religious freedoms of service members would be protected moving forward.
“These mandates certainly harmed our military’s readiness and tragically destroyed the careers of thousands of brave volunteers,” the Republican Senator wrote in a letter obtained by Fox News Digital. “These members have faced negative implications for veterans benefits and employment outside of the military. It is likely that most of those former members will never return to the military and serve our nation.”
According to Task and Purpose, thousands of troops unsuccessfully sought religious exemptions from the vaccination, including 8,945 soldiers, 10,800 airmen and guardians, 4,172 sailors, and 3,717 Marines.
Elon Musk’s Stand Against the Censorship Industrial Complex
Los Angeles Daily News reported:
Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and vowed to restore freedom of speech on social media, a lot of people have been out to get him. We’ve been living through a war over the existence of freedom of speech in America. If you haven’t been keeping up with it, here’s a short summary: The U.S. government, including the intelligence agencies and the FBI, pressured and coerced social media platforms to censor and suppress the constitutionally protected free speech of Americans.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he exposed it. At the same time, lawsuits filed by people who were censored and suppressed exposed even more of it. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering one of these lawsuits and a decision is expected by June. It will probably be the most consequential First Amendment case in American history. That case was previously known as Missouri v. Biden, now called Murthy v. Missouri.
The First Amendment makes clear that the government is prohibited from “abridging the freedom of speech,” but what has been exposed is a carefully crafted workaround. The U.S. government organized and funded third-party groups to do “research” on everything that everyone was saying on the internet and how widely that speech was disseminated. The government then “flagged” certain content and individuals and pressured social media companies to remove them.
It was mass surveillance and mass censorship.
U.S. Joins 17 Other Countries in Agreement to Keep AI Safe
Eighteen countries including the U.S. released an international agreement Sunday focused on keeping artificial intelligence safe during development and deployment and calling on AI companies that create and use AI systems to make them “secure by design” against bad actor — the latest intergovernmental initiative tackling AI development and safety.
The AI safety guidelines were jointly released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre.
The non-binding 20-page agreement says AI companies need to keep customers and the general public safe from the misuse of AI systems as they are developed, deployed and maintained.
Germany, Italy, Norway, Australia, Chile, Nigeria and Singapore are among the countries that are part of the agreement. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are among the organizations that contributed to developing the guidelines.
California’s Privacy Watchdog Eyes AI Rules With Opt-Out and Access Rights
California’s Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) is preparing for its next trick: Putting guardrails on AI.
The state privacy regulator, which has an important role in setting rules of the road for digital giants given how much of Big Tech (and Big AI) is headquartered on its sun-kissed soil, has today published draft regulations for how people’s data can be used for what it refers to as automated decisionmaking technology (ADMT*). Aka AI.
The draft represents “by far the most comprehensive and detailed set of rules in the ‘AI space’”, Ashkan Soltani, the CPPA’s exec director, told TechCrunch. The approach takes inspiration from existing rules in the European Union, where the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has given individuals rights over automated decisions with a legal or significant impact on them since coming into force back in May 2018 — but aims to build on it with more specific provisions that may be harder for tech giants to wiggle away from.
The core of the planned regime — which the Agency intends to work on finalizing next year, after a consultation process — includes opt-out rights, pre-use notice requirements and access rights which would enable state residents to obtain meaningful information on how their data is being used for automation and AI tech.
China’s COVID Trauma Returns as Hazmat Workers Disinfect Streets
Public health workers wearing full protective gear have appeared on the streets of northern China, according to footage on social media, evoking memories of the country’s stringent anti-virus measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hazmat-clad personnel were seen spraying disinfectant in public spaces in Sanhe, in China’s northern Hebei Province roughly 50 miles east of the capital Beijing, according to the poster of the images and video footage. It remains unclear whether this was a local government initiative or a central government directive.
The re-emergence of the gear, however, has raised speculation about the potential return of pandemic-era restrictions amid a surge of respiratory illnesses, notably among children, which has strained hospitals in the region. The outbreak is being closely watched by the World Health Organization, the agency said last week.
The public’s memory of the workers included their strict enforcement of anti-virus policies, such as involuntary quarantine at home, the forced removal of suspected cases from their homes, and — in a number of high-profile incidents — the killing of pets or stray animals.
The surge in infections has been attributed by Chinese health authorities to a confluence of typically mild mycoplasma pneumonia, adenovirus and other seasonal illnesses. This surge is exacerbated by children’s reduced exposure to these illnesses during lockdown, creating an “immunity gap,” the state-backed Global Times newspaper cited respiratory expert Wang Guangfa as saying.
‘We Will Coup Whoever We Want!’: The Unbearable Hubris of Musk and the Billionaire Tech Bros
Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon, underground lair in New Zealand, or virtual reality server in the cloud. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, and sad artifacts of the civilization they will leave behind in their inexorable colonization of the next dimension.
Indeed, there is an imperiousness to the way the new billionaire class disregards people and places for which it is hard to find historical precedent. Mark Zuckerberg had to go all the way back to Augustus Caesar for a role model, and his admiration for the emperor borders on obsession. He models his haircut on Augustus; his wife joked that three people went on their honeymoon to Rome: Mark, Augustus and herself; he named his second daughter August; and he used to end Facebook meetings by proclaiming “Domination!”
Elon Musk not only owns X and Tesla but also SpaceX, StarLink, the Boring Company, Solar City, NeuraLink, xAI, and someday, he hopes, another finance company like PayPal (which he co-founded with Thiel but then sold to eBay). Similarly, Jeff Bezos doesn’t just control Amazon — the world’s biggest ever retailer if that even does justice to the monolith — but the Washington Post, IMDb, MGM, Twitch, Zoox, Kiva, Whole Foods, Ring, Ivona, One Medical, Blue Origin and, of course, Amazon Web Services, which owns at least one-third of the cloud computing market.
Included in Bill Gates’s 20 billion dollars’ worth of Microsoft stock and assets are Microsoft Azure (his 23% of the cloud), LinkedIn, Skype and GitHub. He also, incidentally, owns 109,000 hectares (270,000 acres) of U.S. farmland.
This is unprecedentedly broad, or what could be called “horizontal” power. It is success across such a wide spectrum that has given today’s tech billionaires false confidence in the extent of their own expertise. Gates, who regularly dispensed advice on vaccines and public health in television interviews, eventually issued a report in which he graded each country’s pandemic response as if he were a school teacher who knew better than every nation’s Department of Health (no one got an A).
