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Thousands Rally in LA to Oppose COVID Vaccine Mandates
Thousands of people including truckers and firefighters from across the country gathered Sunday outside Los Angeles City Hall to protest vaccination mandates designed to slow the spread of COVID-19.
The crowd gathered at Grand Park to hear speakers and performers, while big-rig trucks from the “People’s Convoy” were parked on nearby streets. Members of the convoy jammed traffic during a Washington, DC, protest earlier this year.
Organizers of the protest are opposing several COVID-19-related bills that have been proposed in the Legislature, although the broadest has been put on hold. Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, shelved her measure that would have required all public or private employees or independent contractors to be vaccinated. Wicks cited easing pandemic conditions and opposition from public safety unions.
Airline Worker Forced on Unpaid Leave Over COVID Vaccine Mandate Vows Fight Is ‘Far From Over’ at LA Rally
A “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Downtown Los Angeles Sunday afternoon drew thousands of protesters and a lineup of speakers who shared their stories about refusing to obey COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Among the many speakers was United Airlines pilot Sherry Walker, who says she was forced on unpaid leave and prohibited from accessing her 401(k) benefits for her refusal to take the vaccine.
Walker, with help of two other people, led more than 2,000 United Airlines employees in a lawsuit against the company for “discriminating, and retaliating against the unvaccinated, and forcing them on unpaid leave.”
The courts ruled in their favor in February, but Walker, through Airline Employees 4 Health Freedom (AE4HF), the organization she co-founded, is helping airline employees get back to work. She said her case was far from over.
COVID Curveball: Former Yankee Stadium Waitress Fired Over Vaccine Mandate After NYC Mayor Exempts Players
A New York City waitress who had been working at Yankee Stadium for 17 years is speaking out after she was fired over the vaccine mandate while Mayor Eric Adams officially exempted athletes and performers from the policy.
“It’s heinous,” Virginia Alleyne told co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” on Sunday. “What Mayor Adams has done is show us that the workers and plebeians don’t matter; that because we’re not millionaires, we have no value, no worth, and mostly that we are dispensable.”
Alleyne is expected to file suit against Adams over the policy, accusing him of not basing the move on science.
“Every New Yorker should be offended by this executive order 62,” her attorney James Mermigis said. “It’s an insult, quite frankly, to my client, who has worked 17 years at Yankee Stadium. It’s also an insult to all the city workers, the policemen, the firemen, the teachers, the healthcare workers, the sanitation workers who have been terminated from their jobs because of their refusal to vaccinate.”
12 Massachusetts State Police Members Fired for Refusing COVID Shot
A dozen members of the Massachusetts State Police have been fired for refusing to comply with the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, officials said.
The members — one sergeant and 11 Massachusetts State troopers — were terminated on Friday following a hearing process over their vaccination status, State Police spokesperson David Procopio told MassLive in a statement.
The 12 members of the Massachusetts State Police will be unable to appeal their terminations, as they had already been denied religious or medical exemptions, The Boston Globe reported.
“Governor Baker has proven yet again just how hypocritical he is,” Patrick McNamara, president of the State Police Association of Massachusetts, the union that represents troopers, said in a statement. “As part of a Friday night news dump, he has just terminated at least 12 Troopers due to his vaccine mandate. No appeals. No due process.”
Biden Official: Mask Mandate for Airplanes Could Be Extended
Extending the federal transportation mask mandate that applies to airplanes, buses and trains is “absolutely on the table,” Ashish Jha, the White House’s new COVID-19 response coordinator, said Monday on the Today Show.
The transportation mask mandate was extended last month but is currently set to expire on April 18.
Jha stressed that the decision to extend the transportation mandate lies with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky.
COVID-19 cases have been rising in a number of states due to the spread of the Omicron subvariant BA.2. However, Jha cautioned that he was not “overly concerned” by the trend.
California, New York Handled COVID Lockdowns the Worst, Florida Among the Best, a New Study Shows
A new study has graded states by how well they handled the coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent restrictions and lockdowns, showing a stark contrast between liberal and conservative states.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity study compared state performance on metrics including the economy, education, and mortality from the virus, and examined how states and their respective governments handled the pandemic response.
New York, California, New Jersey and Illinois were among the worst in dealing with the coronavirus, performing “poorly on every measure,” the report said. These states “had high age-adjusted death rates; they had high unemployment and significant GDP losses, and they kept their schools shut down much longer than almost all other states,” the report added.
The study also found no correlation in those states that enacted stringent travel, vocation and dining restrictions with lower death totals.
6 Chicago Teachers Who Sued School System Over Vaccine Mandate Win Legal Victory
An Illinois judge issued a temporary restraining order Friday that prevents Chicago Public Schools from taking employment action against six teachers for refusing to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination or undergo weekly testing.
CPS is “the only school district left in the state that’s still enforcing this. None of the rest of the school districts that are in this case are trying to get vaccination or testing compliance out of teachers,” said downstate attorney Tom DeVore, who represents the six CPS teachers. “They should drop it.”
CPS announced an employee vaccine mandate in August, with allowances for medical or religious exemptions. The district later relaxed those rules but said partially vaccinated and unvaccinated staff members had to test weekly for COVID-19. CPS says about 8.5% of its staff — some 4,100 employees — are required to test, according to district data.
NYC Contracted Unlicensed Security Firm to Guard COVID Isolation Hotels, Drawing Scrutiny From Investigators
During the early days of the pandemic, former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration booked hundreds of hotel rooms across the city that were to be used by New Yorkers who had tested positive for COVID-19 and needed a place to isolate.
As part of the initiative, the administration outsourced security on the premises — and one company contracted to guard at least 17 of the isolation hotels was unlicensed to do that work and now faces scrutiny from three local investigative agencies as a result, the Daily News has learned.
The company, Global Operations Security, locked in the hotel contract worth more than $7 million from the city Emergency Management Department on April 18, 2020, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by The News.
The apparent misrepresentation allowed Global to collect millions of taxpayer dollars, and a city Department of Investigation spokeswoman confirmed Friday that her agency recently received a referral from Mayor Adams’ office asking for a probe of alleged wrongdoing related to the hotel security contract.
COVID Digest: Germany May Reintroduce Restrictions in Fall, After Vaccine Mandate’s ‘Clear Defeat’
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach on Friday admitted that imposing a general vaccine mandate in Germany was now unlikely after lawmakers rejected imposing vaccine requirements on people older than 60, in a major blow to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government.
The vote was “a clear and bitter defeat for all those who advocate compulsory vaccinations,” Lauterbach said, adding that as a result “the room for maneuver to further relax the rules has been completely exhausted.’
He warned that the country may need to reintroduce requirements, such as mask-wearing, in the fall when infections are expected to rise.
Woman Shares ‘Horrific’ Day of Shanghai’s COVID Lockdown in Viral Clip
A video has gone viral on TikTok as a woman continues to document her experience living through Shanghai’s current COVID lockdown as the city battles the highly contagious Omicron variant.
On Monday afternoon, local time, Rochelle, @its__rochelle, posted a video from “lockdown day 10” which she called the “most horrific day so far,” in the video’s caption. The video has now been viewed over 1 million times.
In the comment section, Rochelle gave a bit more context about what she has witnessed around her. She said her compound was supposed to be receiving a food package over the weekend but so far it has not arrived.
She said she has learned that people in other compounds have had “actual” chains put on their doors with stickers placed over them. She showed some footage of this in the video.
Is Social Media (Re)Traumatizing You?
What happens when you’re out of content to scroll through and react to on the internet? What’s there to keep you engaged whether the content makes you angry, sad, happy or all of the above at once? What can a company like Facebook, Google or Twitter do to keep their hooks in so you keep coming back like a zombie begging for more? A new feature? An algorithm tweak?
Nope. It all comes back to you. You’re the one who’s going to keep you engaged when there isn’t enough out there to rope you back in. Not only are these companies making us chase our own tails, and by design, I might add, it might be doing actual damage to our psyche. That’s what has happened to mine, and it took me quite a while to realize it.
The deep dark secret, though, is that your No. 1 enemy on the internet might be you. It is most certainly the case for me and some folks I’ve talked to over the past two years during the weirdest simultaneous slow down and speed up in tech that I can remember in the last 30 years. The tech itself isn’t all that evolved, but the need and want to connect with others is. But that’s not the really traumatizing part.
Facebook Messenger’s ‘Dangerous’ New Update — Why You Should Be Concerned
If you’re one of Facebook Messenger’s 1.3 billion users, then Meta’s determination to radically change your app gained serious momentum this week. Despite multiple warnings that this update is a dangerous step in the wrong direction, Meta is not listening.
We are talking end-to-end encryption, of course, and Meta/Facebook’s ongoing program to bring the same level of security that protects WhatsApp to Messenger and even Instagram. These plans, first announced in 2019, have been seemingly plagued with technical challenges. The global rollout is not expected until late 2023.
Put simply, while full end-to-end encryption makes absolute sense on dedicated messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Signal, it is not the same when linked to social media platforms. I cannot browse WhatsApp, looking at profiles and photos, selecting people to click to contact. I cannot mask my identity behind a fake profile in WhatsApp. And, most critically, WhatsApp is not a sticky platform for kids, in the way that Facebook and Instagram (as well as TikTok) are.
John Oliver on Online Data Brokers: ‘What They Can Buy Is Pretty Troubling’
John Oliver took aim at the dark art of data brokers, raising the alarm on unregulated practices that many internet users are unaware of. The Last Week Tonight host discussed the “unsettling moments” that often happen throughout the day online, as we discover that companies are “monitoring our activities a little bit closer than we would like.”
He called attention to data brokers, who are part of a multibillion-dollar industry that encompasses “everyone from credit reporting companies to these weird people-finding websites whenever you Google the name of your friend’s sketchy new boyfriend”.
They “collect your personal information and then resell or share it with others” and have once been referred to as the “middlemen of surveillance capitalism.”
“It’s a sprawling, unregulated ecosystem,” and looking into what they do and how they do it can get “very creepy, very fast.”
