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U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Religious Challenge to New York Vaccine Mandate
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected challenges brought by a group of Christian doctors and nurses and an organization that promotes vaccine skepticism to New York’s refusal to allow religious exemptions to the state’s mandate that healthcare workers be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Acting in two cases, the justices denied emergency requests for an injunction requiring the state to permit religious exemptions while litigation over the mandate‘s legality continues in lower courts. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted the injunction.
The Supreme Court previously rejected other challenges to vaccine mandates including one focusing upon Maine’s lack of a religious exemption for healthcare workers.
Why Some Hospitals Are Dropping Vaccine Mandates for Healthcare Workers
International Business Times reported:
Hospitals across the U.S. are doing away with their vaccine mandates as a result of a persistent shortage of healthcare workers, according to a report Monday in The Wall Street Journal.
Hospital chains and nonprofit hospitals are dropping the mandate in a bid to hold on to staff members who range from nurses to sanitation workers. Medical professionals are reporting high rates of burnout and frustration with shortages of the necessary equipment to do their jobs.
“It’s been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around,” employee-benefits lawyer Wade Symons told the Journal.
Vaccine mandates only added to the flight of healthcare workers as a number of them refused to comply.
Vaccine Holdouts in U.S. Military Approach 40,000 Even as Omicron Variant Fuels Call for Boosters
The number of active-duty U.S. military personnel declining to be vaccinated against the coronavirus by their prescribed deadlines is as high as 40,000, with new Army data showing that, days ahead of its cutoff, 3% of soldiers either have rejected President Biden’s mandate or sought a long-shot exemption.
Military leaders have few options to address the dissent other than to hope that, as waiver requests are denied, more troops will choose to fall in line. The alternative, the Pentagon has said, is to purge the ranks of those failing to meet requirements, though some of those roughly 40,000 service members opting out had already planned to leave the military.
The numbers are unlikely to change much before Wednesday, when the Army’s deadline arrives and all 1.3 million active-duty personnel are expected either to be fully vaccinated or have an exemption in hand.
Bill De Blasio Avoids Saying Whether NYC Companies Should Fire Unvaccinated Staff
Mayor of New York Bill de Blasio refused to answer a question from CNN‘s Jake Tapper about whether New York City businesses would fire unvaccinated staff during the winter holiday season.
The mayor was being interviewed with the Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, and the two lawmakers debated over whether vaccine mandates were necessary to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
De Blasio has mandated that all unvaccinated private-sector workers in New York City get vaccinated by Dec. 27. Such a strict policy regarding vaccine mandates has not yet been seen elsewhere in the United States.
Connecticut Will Have Proof-of-Vaccination Cellphone App
Connecticut residents soon will be able to show their vaccination status using a cellphone app, though whether it’s required will be up to businesses, restaurants and other establishments.
Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont announced Friday the app will be available by the end of the year. Lamont hasn’t followed the example of Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has reinstituted a statewide mask mandate beginning Monday.
Lamont said the cellphone app will give restaurants and stores the tools they need to determine what restrictions to put in place, if any. The digital passport, which Lamont said he prefers to call a digital health card since the term passport has become politicized, will use a QR code and will be tied into the state’s vaccination database.
More Missouri Health Departments Stop COVID Services After Threats From AG Eric Schmitt
Over a half-dozen more Missouri health departments stop COVID services after Attorney General Eric Schmitt threatened legal action if they were to continue.
At least six health departments issued statements Thursday night saying they would halt all COVID-related work, including case investigations, contact tracing, quarantine directives and public announcement of the number of cases and deaths.
Schmitt, a Republican who is running for the U.S. Senate, sent letters this week to local health officials and school districts threatening legal action if they didn’t obey a ruling made the previous month by Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green that banned COVID regulations and health orders from local health departments, according to The Associated Press.
Pennslyvania Supreme Court Strikes Down School Mask Mandate Imposed by Wolf Administration
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday struck down the school mask mandate imposed by the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, affirming a lower court ruling that said state health officials lacked the authority to set the blanket requirement for students across the state.
The ruling removed a previous order that allowed the mask mandate to remain in place while the Wolf administration appealed the Commonwealth Court ruling from last month. The Supreme Court justices did not issue an opinion on the case, but promised one would be coming.
Mass Protest in Vienna Against Austria’s Controversial COVID Restrictions
Tens of thousands of people rallied in Vienna on Saturday in protest against restrictions introduced to halt the spread of coronavirus in Austria, including mandatory COVID-19 vaccines and home confinement orders for the unvaccinated.
Around 1,400 police officers were on duty to oversee the protest, which attracted an estimated 44,000 people, and followed a similar demonstration in the Austrian capital last week. read more
Thousands Protest in Prague Against COVID Vaccine Mandate
Several thousand people marched through the Czech capital on Sunday, protesting a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for certain groups including people age 60 and over.
The protesters, chanting “Freedom!” alleged their constitutional rights are being violated. They said they weren’t against voluntary vaccination but opposed a vaccine mandate.
The outgoing government released an order this week, making vaccination mandatory for the 60 and over age group, as well as medical personnel, police officers, firefighters and medical students.
Russia Backing Away From COVID Restrictions That Sparked Outrage
Russian authorities have backed away from imposing COVID-19 restrictions that have sparked outrage in a country that has a low vaccination rate, The Associated Press reported.
Duma State speaker Vyacheslav Volodin confirmed on Monday the withdrawal of the proposed bill setting out the restrictions, which was excepted go through its first reading on Thursday. If passed, the bill would have restricted access to domestic and international flights and trains for residents who are fully vaccinated, recently recovered from the virus and who are medically exempt from vaccination.
This comes as residents in different regions of the country have started staging protests against the proposed restrictions and have launched online petitions against them, the AP reported.
South Korea to Test Artificial Intelligence-Powered Facial Recognition to Track COVID Cases
South Korea will soon roll out a pilot project to use artificial intelligence, facial recognition and thousands of CCTV cameras to track the movement of people infected with the coronavirus, despite concerns about the invasion of privacy.
The system uses AI algorithms and facial recognition technology to analyze footage gathered by more than 10,820 CCTV cameras and track an infected person’s movements, anyone they had close contact with, and whether they were wearing a mask.
Governments around the world have turned to new technologies and expanded legal powers to try to stem the tide of COVID-19 infections. China, Russia, India, Poland and Japan as well as several U.S. states are among the governments to have rolled out or at least experimented with facial recognition systems for tracking COVID-19 patients, according to a March report by Columbia Law School in New York.
Watchdog Says Federal Anti-Terror Unit Investigated Journalists
A special Customs and Border Protection unit used sensitive government databases intended to track terrorists to investigate as many as 20 U.S.-based journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter, according to a federal watchdog.
Yahoo News, which published an extensive report on the investigation, also found that the unit, the Counter Network Division, queried records of congressional staffers and perhaps members of Congress.
Jeffrey Rambo, an agent who acknowledged running checks on journalists in 2017, told federal investigators the practice is routine.
Facebook Exec Says ‘People,’ Not Platform, to Blame for Vaccine Misinformation
Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth said in an interview aired Sunday that the burden of misinformation spreading on the social media platform fell on individual users.
Bosworth told Axios it was undemocratic for a social platform to attempt to control people’s speech, even in cases when it might be harmful.
“I don’t believe that the answer is ‘I will deny these people the information they seek, and I will enforce my will upon them.’ That can’t be the right answer. That cannot be the democratic answer,” Bosworth said, noting “the onus is and should be, in any meaningful democracy, on the individual.”
‘They Were Spying On Us’: Amazon, Walmart, Use Surveillance Technology to Bust Unions
Workplace surveillance, already widespread in the U.S., has become even more prevalent during the pandemic as employers try to enforce public health measures and monitor remote workers.
According to research by Gartner, a market research firm, 60% of large employers use workplace monitoring tools, twice as many as before the pandemic. Coworker.org, a labor research nonprofit, recently compiled a database of over 550 of these commercially available products, which it dubs “little tech,” and published a study outlining potential harms and noting the industry’s general lack of regulation.
Technology-enabled surveillance — from keycard tagging and email monitoring to social media tracking and worker profiling — often introduced in the name of safety and productivity can have a chilling effect on organizing and allow companies to sidestep labor law.
Members of Congress Publicly Blast Facebook but Quietly Invest Their Savings in the Social-Media Giant
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Facebook shameful and irresponsible. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon suggested prison time for the tech giant’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Ro Khanna of California said Facebook should be broken up.
But despite their tough talk toward the social-media behemoth, all three of those Democratic lawmakers or their spouses stood to gain financially from Facebook.
They were among at least 31 lawmakers in the House and Senate — 18 Democrats and 13 Republicans — whose families held investments in the tech company during 2020, according to an Insider investigation of lawmakers’ most recent financial disclosures.
Twitter Will Now Ban Users That Repeatedly Claim Vaccinated People Can Spread COVID
Twitter has quietly updated its “COVID-19 misleading information policy” to impose new sanctions on tweets about vaccines, PCR tests and health authorities. These sanctions include removing and labeling tweets. Both types of sanctions also result in Twitter users accruing strikes on their accounts, which can lead to a permanent suspension.
One of the most notable changes to this “COVID-19 misleading information policy” we noticed is related to claims about whether vaccinated people can spread the coronavirus. The policy now states that Twitter will label tweets with “corrective information” and give users a strike if they:
Claim that “the vaccines will cause you to be sick, spread the virus or would be more harmful than getting COVID-19” and post what Twitter describes as “false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus (or symptoms, or immunity) to unvaccinated people.”
