Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
LA City Council Approves COVID Vaccine Mandate for Indoor Spaces
The city of Los Angeles now has one of strictest vaccine mandates in the country.
The Los Angeles City Council approved an ordinance on Wednesday that will require people to show proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before entering indoor restaurants, bars, gyms, shopping centers, entertainment venues and personal care establishments beginning Nov. 4.
The city now requires full vaccination or a proof of a negative COVID test for “mega events,” which include any events with more than 10,000 people. This includes sporting events, concerts, and all indoor bars and nightclubs.
Kaiser Permanente Suspends More Than 2,200 Workers for Ignoring Vaccine Mandate
Kaiser Permanente has suspended more than 2,200 employees who have not yet gotten vaccinated, according to reports.
The workers, who make up between 1% and 2% of the healthcare company’s nationwide workforce, have been placed on unpaid administrative leave, according to FOX 2 in the Bay Area.
The company announced the vaccine mandate in August and said this week that employees will have until Dec. 1 to get the vaccine or they could lose their jobs.
Workers Face Mounting Pressure to Get Their Shots — Or Get Fired
As many companies impose COVID-19 vaccine mandates, employees who refuse to get jabbed are getting the ax. Employers in the healthcare and aviation industries have already dismissed thousands of workers who declined to get inoculated.
This week, Northwell Health, the largest healthcare provider in New York, said it fired 1,400 employees, who make up less than 2% of its staff, for failing to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Both the company and the state of New York have vaccine mandates in place. New York requires its more than 650,000 hospital and nursing home workers be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or else lose their jobs.
Hospital System Says It Will Deny Transplants to the Unvaccinated in ‘Almost All Situations’
The Washington Post via MSN reported:
A Colorado-based health system says it is denying organ transplants to patients not vaccinated against the coronavirus in “almost all situations,” citing studies that show these patients are much more likely to die if they get COVID-19.
The policy illustrates the growing costs of being unvaccinated and wades into deeply controversial territory — the use of immunization status to decide who gets limited medical care. The mere idea of prioritizing the vaccinated for rationed health resources has drawn intense backlash, as overwhelmingly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients push some hospitals to adopt “crisis standards of care,” in which health systems can prioritize patients for scarce resources based largely on their likelihood of survival.
Louisiana Health System Charging Workers $200 for Unvaccinated Spouses
It could pay to encourage your spouse to become vaccinated against COVID-19, especially as the financial cost of refusing to get the jab rises.
Ochsner Health, the largest nonprofit health care system in Louisiana, announced it will charge workers an additional $200 per month to insure their unvaccinated spouses or partners covered by the hospital group’s insurance policies, citing the high cost of caring for and treating patients with COVID-19.
The company referred to the new surcharge, which will take effect in 2022, as a “cost adjustment for adult dependents (spouses and domestic partners) who are not vaccinated against COVID-19.”
What’s Good, Bad, and Missing in the Facebook Whistleblower’s Testimony
“This is not simply a matter of certain social media users being angry or unstable, or about one side being radicalized against the other,” Haugen told Congress. “It is Facebook choosing to grow at all costs, becoming an almost trillion-dollar company by buying its profits with our safety.”
The Senate largely ate it up. Long frustrated by Facebook’s size and power — and, one suspects, by its own inability to address those issues in any constructive way — senators yielded the floor to Haugen to make her case. During the hearing titled “Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower,” Haugen walked senators through most of The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files, touching on ethnic violence, national security, polarization, and more during her testimony.
French Senate Introduces Bill to Mandate COVID Vaccinations for All Beginning January 1, 2022
Following in the footsteps of much of Europe, France has introduced several stringent vaccine mandates that have irrevocably changed the landscape of life in the nation. The city of lights has been illuminated with the allegorical ambiance of pitchforks and torches as massive protests have taken to the streets of Paris since President Emmanuel Macron announced measures on July 12th that require proof of vaccination to enter cafés, restaurants, and even hospitals.
The forewarning of the outcries of those protesters has now reached its apotheosis as the Social Affairs Committee of the French Senate has introduced a bill that will require mandatory vaccinations against COVID-19 for all citizens beginning on January 1st, 2022. The proposed vaccine mandate was introduced by Senator Bernard Jomier on October 4th.
Senator Brad Hoylman Introduces Legislation to End Vaccine Mandate Loophole Used by Joe Rogan
The New York State Senate reported:
Yesterday, Senator Brad Hoylman introduced the Fairly Applying Individual Requirements (“FAIR”) Vaccine Mandates Act which would prevent unvaccinated non-NYC based performers and professional athletes from exploiting a loophole in NYC’s vaccine mandate that allows them to evade local vaccine requirements.
Senator Hoylman said: “If New Yorkers attend an entertainment or sporting event they must provide proof of a COVID-19 vaccine. But New York City grants special privileges to out-of-town anti-vaxxers like Joe Rogan and NBA star Bradley Beal. This loophole puts the health of New Yorkers at risk, so I’ve introduced the FAIR Vaccines Mandate Act to close it. Our message is simple: Get jabbed or get outta town.”
Why You Suddenly Need to Delete Google Chrome
An alarming new update from Google that hasn’t yet made headlines has suddenly put Chrome’s 2.6 billion users at risk of “surveillance, manipulation and abuse.” If you’re one of those users, this nasty new surprise just gave you a reason to quit.
Chrome has serious issues when it comes to protecting your security and your privacy. The world’s leading browser has issued one urgent fix after another this year, as high-risk exploits have been found in the wild; and just a few weeks ago, Google finally admitted it had “accidentally” allowed millions of users to be secretly tracked.
Google says it wants to change, to put your privacy first, that web tracking is now out of control and has resulted in “an erosion of trust.” But as DuckDuckGo warns, “it’s all noise until Google actually agrees to collect less data and do less behavioral targeting.”
Vaccine Passports Mandated in the New World Order
At this moment in western democracies, we are passing into a period of great unrest — social, political, and corporate — where governments are enabling and exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to justify the suppression of civil rights. We became prone to think by merely reciting The Constitution, a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or great acts of past patriotism that the future liberties are forever secure to us because we simply inherited the fine qualities of common descent and live in the same democratic territories.
This is not about whether one should take the COVID-19 vaccine to protect themselves from illness but rather the dangers of the health crisis becoming the vehicle where totalitarianism has invoked a state of emergency where vaccine passports are compulsory to quell a global and national threat.
‘Dystopian World’: Singapore Patrol Robots Stoke Fears of Surveillance State
Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in “undesirable social behaviour”, adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns.
Officials have long pushed a vision of a hyper-efficient, tech-driven “smart nation”, but activists say privacy is being sacrificed and people have little control over what happens to their data.
Singapore is frequently criticised for curbing civil liberties and people are accustomed to tight controls, but there is still growing unease at intrusive tech.
