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Cory Franklin: Suppressing Debate on COVID Policies Leads to Mistrust in Public Health
China has abandoned its zero-COVID-19 campaign, and with the loosening of social restrictions, the country has shifted its focus from preventing COVID-19 infections to managing them. As part of that program, Li Guangxi, with China’s State Council Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism, gave an interview last month encouraging people to take Chinese medicine for severe COVID-19, specifically ginger and Chinese ginseng, “the best ginseng in the world.”
Are ginger and Chinese ginseng effective in fighting COVID-19? Who knows? There must be some studies out there somewhere. But that brief interview touting unproven medicines was startling.
Think about what may have happened if an American scientist or official had given the same advice publicly. Hearing those recommendations, our medical influencers might have gone nuclear. A high public official in totalitarian China basically said things that conceivably could get a U.S. speaker censored or canceled by the American scientific establishment.
It is discouraging to witness the extreme tactics the medical community has used to keep its members in line during the pandemic. Public intimidation, harassment, personal attacks, retraction of scientific papers after publication and career sabotage have been carried out with an eye toward bringing any dissenters in line, making sure they self-censor and refrain from expressing their views on controversial subjects such as the origin of COVID-19. Reader beware: It’s as much what you don’t read as what you do.
If You’ve Ever Posted Anything Online, ChatGPT Has Probably Seen It
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within two months of its release, it reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched. Users are attracted to the tool’s advanced capabilities — and concerned by its potential to cause disruption in various sectors.
A much less discussed implication is the privacy risks ChatGPT poses to each and every one of us. Just yesterday, Google unveiled its own conversational AI called Bard, and others will surely follow. Technology companies working on AI have well and truly entered an arms race.
The problem is it’s fueled by our personal data. ChatGPT is underpinned by a large language model that requires massive amounts of data to function and improve. The more data the model is trained on, the better it gets at detecting patterns, anticipating what will come next and generating plausible text.
The data collection used to train ChatGPT is problematic for several reasons. None of us were asked whether OpenAI could use our data. This is a clear violation of privacy, especially when data are sensitive and can be used to identify us, our family members, or our location.
NYC Unions Demand Reinstatement, Back Pay for Workers Fired for Refusing COVID Shots: ‘Make These People Whole’
New York City’s public sector unions are doubling down on a quest to get their members reinstated with back pay if they were fired for refusing to vaccinate themselves against COVID-19.
The renewed push for reinstatement comes in response to Mayor Adams’ announcement on Monday that his administration will later this week drop the city government’s longstanding coronavirus vaccine mandate.
Under Adams’ mandate rollback plan, city workers terminated for not getting their coronavirus shots would have a chance to reapply for their old jobs — but Municipal Labor Committee Chairman Harry Nespoli said that’s not good enough.
Nespoli, who also serves as the head of the Sanitation Department’s largest union, argued that all city workers axed because of the mandate should be automatically given their jobs back, and awarded back pay to compensate for the time they went without income. “I’m going to take all legal action I can to make these people whole,” Nespoli told the Daily News on Tuesday.
Biden Calls for Ban of Online Ads Targeting Children
President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address unveiled a tech agenda focused on protecting children’s privacy online. Biden’s speech called out tech companies’ grip on young Americans and sounded the alarm on how social media affects teenagers’ mental health.
“It’s time to pass bipartisan legislation to stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on our kids and teenagers online,” Biden said. “Ban targeted advertising on children, and impose stricter limits on the personal data that companies collect on all of us.”
He called for similar measures at last year’s State of the Union as well.
Digital privacy concerns for children have grown exponentially, especially as more than half of America’s teens say it’d be difficult to give up social media. Those concerns include the use of targeted advertising geared toward children, and the collection of their data, both of which are bipartisan issues on Capitol Hill.
Biden Administration Opposes Overturning COVID Vaccine Entry Requirements
Non-U.S. citizens who are not permanent residents of the U.S. have been required to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination before entering the country.
On Tuesday, the Biden administration said it opposes House Resolution 185, which would remove the government’s ability to enforce the requirement. The opposition comes despite the administration saying it plans to end the United States COVID-19 emergency declaration this spring.
The bill has garnered 29 Republican cosponsors. While not a cosponsor, House Energy and Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee Chair Brett Guthrie said it’s time for the mandate to end.
“It is long past due to end this mandate,” Guthrie said. “Doing so will align the United States with the rest of North America’s COVID-19 vaccine policy for people coming into the country and recognize COVID-19 is an endemic — rather than a pandemic.”
Redmond Terminates Orders Requiring COVID Vaccines for Firefighters
Redmond firefighters and paramedics will no longer be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to work in the Eastside city.
The firefighters who lost their jobs for not complying with the state’s 2021 coronavirus vaccine mandate won’t be getting their jobs back as a result, however. The city says the former firefighters have the option to apply for a job, regardless of their vaccination status — but currently, there are no open positions in the department.
Redmond Mayor Angela Birney this week terminated two executive orders that mandated firefighters and paramedics be vaccinated against COVID, echoing decisions by King County and the city of Seattle to no longer require proof of vaccination for employees.
Maine Community Colleges Stop Requiring COVID Vaccine
Maine’s community college system has ended a requirement that on-campus students receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The Maine Community College System’s board ended the requirement and the change is effective immediately, the system said in a Wednesday statement.
The board’s vote was unanimous. It also adopted language “to strongly encourage all learners to receive the COVID-19 vaccinations and boosters,” the system said in a statement.
One exception to the new rule is that students in some programs might be required to receive the vaccine due to requirements at third-party locations, the system said. The system includes seven colleges and about 25,000 students.
After U.S. Scrutiny of WeChat, Chinese Conglomerate Tencent Holdings Spent Millions on Federal Lobbying
Chinese multimedia conglomerate Tencent Holdings is one of the largest companies in the world and owns hundreds of brands and subsidiaries, including WeChat. With over a billion active users, WeChat serves as China’s primary messaging app, social media platform and payment app all rolled into one platform. But WeChat, like ByteDance’s TikTok, has come under heavy scrutiny over concerns of user privacy and national security.
Over the last three years, Tencent has spent $6.3 million lobbying the federal government. Tencent began spending on federal lobbying in 2020, the same year former President Donald Trump signed executive orders banning WeChat and TikTok in the United States.
While WeChat has become a staple of everyday Chinese life, the app reportedly became pivotal to Beijing’s surveillance and censorship apparatus. Human rights groups including Human Rights Watch have warned the Chinese government has used WeChat to monitor citizens, spread propaganda and crush dissent.
Sex Trafficking Lawsuit Against Internet Chat Website Cleared to Move Forward
A federal judge has rejected a motion to dismiss a sexual trafficking lawsuit filed against the website Omegle.com, allowing a complaint to move forward involving allegations that a pre-teen was blackmailed and harassed into sending “obscene” content to a sexual predator through the internet chat room.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of a plaintiff identified only with the initials A.M., who indicates that the social media chat site paired her up with a man who sexually abused her online, alleging that Omegle knew it was pairing minors with sexual predators, but continued to do so in order to maintain profits at children’s expense.
A.M. indicates she was only 11 years old in 2014 when Omegle paired her in one-on-one chats with Ryan Fordyce, who was in his late 30s. The lawsuit claims Omegle’s most common use is for live sexual activity, but the company did not have adequate age verification procedures in place, and actively marketed its services to young children.
While Judge Mosman did dismiss a negligence claim, he allowed the other five claims against Omegle to proceed, including defective design, defective warning, failure to warn and sex trafficking of children by force, fraud or coercion.
Alphabet Loses Over $110 Billion Market Cap After AI ChatBot ‘Glitch’
Google owner Alphabet has continued crashing after an underwhelming launch raising concerns that its new artificial intelligence chatbot Bard may yield inaccurate responses. Google was forced to respond after the shares collapsed, saying in a statement that Bard’s response “highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process.”
The company said it will combine external feedback with its own internal testing to ensure Bard’s responses “meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
Today’s drop has wiped over $110 billion off of Alphabet’s market cap. It’s the second-largest daily market cap decline ever. Reuters reports that Google published an online advertisement in which its much anticipated AI chatbot BARD delivered inaccurate answers.
