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Massachusetts Hospital Employee Who Was Fired After Not Getting COVID Vaccine Scores Win in Appeals Court
A Beth Israel employee who was fired after she refused to get the COVID vaccine has scored a win in federal appeals court.
Amanda Bazinet, who worked as an executive office manager at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Milton, sued the hospital when she was terminated over the vaccine mandate.
She had tried to get a religious accommodation for the COVID vaccine in 2021, which the hospital rejected and then sent her packing.
When Bazinet sued Beth Israel over religious discrimination, the federal district court dismissed the case. But now, the federal appeals court has tossed the district court’s ruling.
“Whether Bazinet’s religious discrimination claims will succeed or even survive summary judgment is uncertain. But these claims should have advanced…” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit wrote in its ruling on Tuesday.
“Accordingly, we vacate the district court’s order dismissing Bazinet’s religious discrimination claims and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” the appeals court added.
Did COVID Vax Mandates for Health Workers Increase Uptake? — Yes, but Only Among Younger Workers and in States With No Test-out Options
State COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021 were linked to increased vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in states with no test-out options and among workers younger than 50 years of age, according to a cross-sectional study.
In states with vaccine mandates for healthcare workers, the proportion of healthcare workers ever vaccinated against COVID-19 increased by 3.46 percentage points (95% CI 0.29-6.63, P=0.03) in the 2 weeks after announcement of the mandate, when compared with non-mandate states, reported Charles Stoecker, PhD, of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans, and colleagues.
That result represented a 3.93% increase in the already high percentage of about 88% of healthcare workers previously vaccinated in mandate states, the study authors wrote in JAMA Network Open.
U.S. Homeland Security Will Reportedly Collect Face Scans of Migrant Kids
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is looking to improve its facial recognition algorithms, is reportedly planning to use the facial data of migrant children entering the country for training. According to MIT Technology Review, the agency intends to collect and analyze facial captures of kids younger than 14. John Boyd, the assistant director of Homeland Security’s Office of Biometric Identity Management who’s involved in the development of biometric services for the government, told the publication that the collection will include children “down to the infant.”
Programs that collect biometric information and even DNA samples from migrants entering the country typically only apply to people between 14 and 79 years old. Boyd said Homeland Security’s plan was likely made possible by some of its sub-offices’ decision to remove age restrictions for the collection of biometric data. Since the information is also supposed to be used for research purposes and not for the agency’s actual operations, Homeland’s restrictions for biometric collection also don’t apply to the program.
Critics and expects have raised concerns about collecting data from migrants, a lot of whom are entering the country in hopes of a better life and may feel like they have no choice but to agree to getting their facial and fingerprint information taken. It’s even more concerning in this case, because children can’t give their informed consent.
2.7 Billion Records Leaked in Massive U.S. Data Breach
A massive database containing over 2.7 billion records has reportedly ended up on a criminal forum. These records belong to individuals in the U.S. and were allegedly stolen from National Public Data (NPD). While the accuracy of the leaked data could not be verified, the hackers reportedly obtained sensitive information such as names, mailing addresses and Social Security numbers. The scale of this breach is so vast that if you live in the U.S., it’s likely that some of your data is included.
The database has been stolen from NPD, which collects data from public sources to compile individual user profiles for people in the U.S. and other countries. NPD then sells this private data to all kinds of organizations, such as background check websites, investigators, app developers and data resellers.
While the database has 2.7 billion records, it’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean 2.7 billion people were impacted. Many of these records are repetitive, and some are incorrect. Still, the breach affects a significant number of people in the States.
Dennis Quaid Says Facebook Is ‘Censoring the Free Flow of Ideas,’ Throttling ‘Reagan’ Movie Promos
Actor Dennis Quaid said that Facebook has been “throttling advertising” for his upcoming film, “Reagan,” due out in theaters in late August.
In a letter sent to Newsweek, Quaid said, “Facebook is once again censoring the free flow of ideas, deciding what’s best for us to see and hear; only this time it’s throttling advertising and promotion for my movie about Ronald Reagan.”
“Like the old Soviet Union — are we turning into a country of tech oligarchs who control the platform of groupthink to silence the individual or ‘other’ groups?” he continued, noting that no one at Facebook had even seen the movie yet.
In addition to Quaid’s complaints on the issue, director of digital marketing Eric McClellan sent a letter directly to Mark Zuckerberg. In the letter, he cited a particularly “egregious” example of Facebook’s attempt to quell their advertising.
What’s Next for KOSA, the Controversial ‘Child Safety’ Bill That Could Change Online Speech
We’ve talked a lot on Decoder about various attempts to regulate the internet in the United States and how they all run into the very simple fact that almost everything on the internet is speech, and the First Amendment prohibits most speech regulations in this country. Literally, it says, “Congress shall make no law…” and that’s why we don’t have any laws.
But there’s a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. It’s called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. You’ve probably heard of KOSPA’s predecessor KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act — it got bundled up with another bill called COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teen’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and that’s how you get KOSPA.
At a broad level, KOSPA is supposed to tackle two big issues: better protecting the privacy of minors online and making tech platforms more responsible for what those minors see and do.
Meta Axed CrowdTangle, a Tool for Tracking Disinformation. Critics Claim Its Replacement Has Just ‘1% of the Features’
Journalists, researchers, and politicians are mourning Meta’s shutdown of CrowdTangle, which they used to track the spread of disinformation on Facebook and Instagram.
In CrowdTangle’s place, Meta is offering its Content Library — but is limiting usage to people from “qualified academic or nonprofit institutions who are pursuing scientific or public interest research.” Many researchers and academics, and most journalists, are barred from accessing the tool.
Many people in the community have written open letters to Meta in protest. They question why the company axed a useful tool for combating misinformation three months ahead of the most contentious U.S. election in history — an election that is already threatened by the proliferation of AI deep fakes and chatbot misinformation, some of which has come from Meta’s own chatbot — and replace it with a tool that academics say is simply not as effective?
