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House Passes Bill to Block HHS From Enforcing Vaccine Mandate at Some Health Facilities
The House passed a bill on Tuesday that seeks to end the vaccine mandate for employees at some health facilities, marking the first pandemic-related bill the Republican majority has approved since taking control of the chamber.
The legislation titled the Freedom for Health Care Workers Act, passed in a 227-203 vote, with seven Democrats joining Republicans in passing the bill.
The measure, introduced by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), calls for stopping the Health and Human Services secretary from enforcing workplace regulations and standards enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic — including the vaccine mandate — at Medicare and Medicaid-certified facilities.
With Democrats maintaining control of the Senate and President Biden likely to veto the bill if it were to reach his desk, the vote on Tuesday was largely a symbolic gesture to record GOP opposition to the administration’s COVID-19 policies.
FTC Slaps $1.5 Million Fine on GoodRx for Sharing Users’ Health Data With Facebook and Google
Online pharmacy GoodRx has agreed to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties for years of sharing the health information of consumers with third parties like Facebook, Google and Criteo for advertising purposes, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday.
In a complaint filed in a California federal court, the FTC accused the healthcare and telemedicine giant of failing to notify consumers that their personal health information — collected while using its website and services — would be shared with third parties.
The FTC said GoodRx “deceptively promised its users that it would never share personal health information with advertisers or other third parties,” but “repeatedly violated this promise,” including by monetizing the data it collected to target its own users with targeted health and medication-specific ads. The FTC said that GoodRx has been doing this “for years.”
Social Media Companies in the U.S. Brace to Battle Onslaught of Legal Challenges
Social media companies in the United States are bracing themselves to battle an onslaught of new state and federal legislation and legal challenges with far-reaching regulatory implications this year.
The majority of U.S. state legislatures have introduced or passed bills attempting to reform how social media giants moderate their content and increase security measures for American users.
Elsewhere on the legal front, the Supreme Court will hear no fewer than four high-profile cases against tech giants, ranging from liability in terrorist attacks to alleged censorship of conservative viewpoints on their platforms.
State and federal lawsuits, two of which were announced this month, also take aim at how social media apps and their highly effective algorithms negatively affect the mental health of American teenagers.
West Point Continues to Impose COVID Vaccine Mandate, Despite Rule’s Lift by Pentagon: Report
The U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, plans to continue to impose restrictions on travel for those cadets who are not vaccinated, despite measures taken at the Pentagon to remove COVID-19 vaccine mandates, according to reports.
Online news organization Just The News reported that military attorney R. Davis Younts said West Point was reimposing a travel ban on unvaccinated cadets, even though the U.S. military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate was lifted.
“The U.S. Military Academy at West Point continues to follow Department of Defense’s guidance regarding unvaccinated service members,” the public affairs office said in an email. “U.S. Army policy states unvaccinated service members are not eligible for official travel without prior approval from the Under Secretary of the Army. Until the policy is rescinded, West Point will continue to follow it.”
Rising Star Linn Grant Likely to Miss First Major of Season Due to U.S. Vaccine Travel Restrictions
Linn Grant will begin her 2023 season in Morocco next week on the Ladies European Tour. One of the most promising young players in the game, Grant was forced to play a limited LPGA schedule last year because U.S. travel restrictions won’t let her in the country as she is not vaccinated against COVID-19.
Grant, who is currently No. 28 in the Rolex Rankings, will be able to compete in the LPGA’s upcoming Asian swing, but her agent, Pelle Krüger said they’re not optimistic that she’ll be able to compete in the year’s first major, the Chevron Championship.
Tennis star Novak Djokovic was not able to compete in the U.S. Open last summer for the same reason.
In January, the U.S. government extended its existing COVID-19 restrictions, which require international visitors to be fully vaccinated against the virus, to April 10. Kruger told Golfweek that while they’re still trying to obtain a pass for special circumstances, they don’t foresee things opening up until at least early May. The Chevron is slated for April 20-23.
Children Lost About 35% of a Normal School Year’s Worth of Learning During the Pandemic, Study Suggests
A new paper adds to the mounting evidence that school-age children across the globe experienced significant setbacks in their learning progress during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Students “lost out on about 35% of a normal school year’s worth of learning” when in-person learning stopped during the public health crisis, according to a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The school closures were intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus, but the new paper suggests that learning deficits emerged and persisted over time. The paper included data from 15 different countries.
“Children still have not recovered the learning that they lost out on at the start of the pandemic,” he said. Also, “education inequality between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds increased during the pandemic. So the learning crisis is an equality crisis. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds were disproportionately affected by school closures.”
The researchers reviewed and analyzed data from 42 studies on learning progress during the pandemic across 15 countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the United States. The studies were published between March 2020 and August 2022. The researchers conducted an initial search for the studies in April 2021 and additional searches in February and August 2022.
U.S. Economy Loses $12 Trillion to COVID Lockdowns, Mandatory Business Closures Cited as Top Reason
U.S. GDP fell during the pandemic due to COVID-19 lockdowns and resulted in trillions of dollars in losses in these past years, a consequence mainly driven by mandatory business closure policies, according to a study by researchers from the University of Southern California (USC).
By the end of 2022, the pandemic had cut $12.2 trillion from U.S. GDP, the study published in Economic Modelling journal estimates. Researchers expect total losses to hit $14 trillion by the end of 2023. The study blamed involuntary business closures as the “leading cause” for the massive decline in America’s GDP during this period.
The study blamed three factors for America’s economic decline during the pandemic: deaths and illnesses, mandatory business closures and voluntary avoidance of activities that stimulate the economy but prevent infection.
Of these three, the study found mandatory business closures had the “greatest impact” on the U.S. economy. During the first six months of the pandemic, business closures accounted for a 26.3% decline in GDP, while work avoidance only made up 12.2% of the decline.
EXCLUSIVE: Ted Cruz Introduces 7 Pieces of Legislation to Block Current and Future Pandemic Gov Mandates
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) unveiled seven pieces of legislation on Tuesday to protect American’s freedoms by blocking current and future government COVID mandates.
The legislation takes aim at vaccine passports, vaccine mandates, mask mandates and other restrictions from the government and medical services.
“Congress must step up and outright ban these mandates. We cannot allow the unprecedented actions taken by the federal government to set a new normal in which politicians and unelected bureaucrats force mandates upon the American people at the drop of a hat — all under the justification of protecting public health,” Cruz told The Daily Wire.
A New Tracker Promises to Collect a Lot More of Your Data. Its Maker Says That’s Better For Your Privacy.
Last week on Zoom, where I spend all the best moments of my life, I spoke with the chief product officer of an ad tech company called FullThrottle. Amol Waishampayan said his company has a brand-new patented technique that will let companies collect even more of your data — ten times more data, he claims — and tie that information to your home address.
He said FullThrottle won’t collect the information without your consent, but he expects a lot of us will give it up willingly. Waishampayan said this tracking will actually be better for your privacy, and in fact, you might even like it. By the time I closed my laptop, I was almost convinced. Almost.
Maybe you heard the news: Google is planning to kill third-party cookies, the primary tool advertising and tech companies have used to track you online for 30 years. The ad business is, to say the least, freaking out. On ad tech Twitter, the land that God forgot, people throw around ideas for cookie-replacements with names like data clean rooms, Unified ID 2.0, and email hashed IDs. Microsoft is pushing a cute little tool called “Parakeet.” Google, which swears it’s killing cookies to protect your privacy and not to exert dominance over the market, will now track and harness your data with something called the Topics API.
Waishampayan said the difference is that his company’s tracker helps a company harvest data on its own customers rather than buying that data from third-party sellers, which are less reliable and less accurate — not to mention worse for your privacy.
The AI Boom Is Here, and so Are the Lawsuits
That was quick: Artificial intelligence has gone from science fiction to novelty to Thing We Are Sure Is the Future. Very, very fast.
One easy way to measure the change is via headlines — like the ones announcing Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the company behind the dazzling ChatGPT text generator, followed by other AI startups looking for big money. Or the ones about school districts frantically trying to cope with students using ChatGPT to write their term papers. Or the ones about digital publishers like CNET and BuzzFeed admitting or bragging that they’re using AI to make some of their content — and investors rewarding them for it.
Then there’s another leading indicator: lawsuits lodged against OpenAI and similar companies, which argue that AI engines are illegally using other people’s work to build their platforms and products. This means they are aimed directly at the current boom of generative AI — software, like ChatGPT, that uses existing text or images or code to create new work.
Gen Z Doesn’t Think Anyone Can Keep Them Safe Online, and One of Their Biggest Concerns Is Photos Getting Leaked
Gen Z doesn’t think anyone can keep them safe online. That’s according to a Dell Technologies study released in December. The company surveyed 15,105 people between the ages of 18 and 26 years from 15 countries about how investments in technology can be used to support the economy. The findings indicate that Gen Z doesn’t trust any entity, public or private, to keep their data safe online.
The survey found that: 18% of respondents said they trust government bodies, ministries, and departments to protect their data; 17% said they trust private sector companies; 25% of respondents said they trust both equally.
As for Gen Z’s top cyber security concern? Having their personal data or photos shared without permission. In addition, more than half of the surveyed individuals said they have low or neutral confidence that their personal data is being stored properly by healthcare providers.
Earlier this month, hackers leaked details of over 200 million Twitter accounts onto an online forum, including email addresses and phone numbers.
Why Do We Still Need Humans, Anyway?
The past four decades or so have seen spectacular technological advances that have vastly disrupted industries, brought unimaginable convenience and efficiencies, and scrambled our brains in ways we may come to regret. So tremendous are the changes that it is remarkable that the journey felt mostly incremental. Rare were the moments when it was clear something spectacular had been unleashed. But we are certainly experiencing such a moment with the arrival of ChatGPT, the hyper-bot cooked up by an outfit called OpenAI.
The program is not in itself a breakthrough — not exactly since the technology behind it has been developing for years. We all have encountered early versions of what artificial intelligence can do in Apple‘s Siri, or even with a Google search. Also, perhaps less impressively, in the aggravating “help” chat services run by various banks.
But ChatGPT is uncanny, and it has seized center stage in the global conversation since being suddenly made available two months ago to the general public. That happened concurrent to news that Microsoft was investing another $10 billion in OpenAI, in a deal that would leave it with a 49-percent stake.
At this very moment almost every major business, and certainly consultancy, is holding emergency meetings to calculate how to integrate ChatGPT into its activities. It’s simplifying the situation to make it all about ChatGPT, but the notion that AI is ready or nearly ready for prime time is correct. This is not a fad.
