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‘Unreasonable’: 20 Universities Still Require Students Get COVID Vaccine
Twenty United States colleges continue to require their students to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the watchdog organization No College Mandates.
These mandates face increasingly heavy criticism from medical doctors and scholars who point to concerns regarding the vaccine’s safety, efficacy, and necessity.
Lucia Sinatra, co-founder of No College Mandates, an organization that tracks and advocates for the abolition of vaccine mandates, told The College Fix that such policies are “unreasonable and discriminatory.”
Many schools have been quietly retiring their vaccine mandates over the past year. The most recent of these include Wayne State University, which announced this month that it “strongly” recommends but no longer requires the vaccine.
Navy SEALs, Sailors Who Refused COVID Vaccine Will Have Records Expunged After Legal Settlement
The U.S. Navy has reached a settlement with sailors who filed a lawsuit over the service’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, ending a nearly four-year saga that pitted Navy SEALs and other service members against their commander in chief.
Under an agreement in the case announced Wednesday, Navy sailors who refused the vaccine for religious reasons can now have their records corrected and will be protected against discrimination on promotion boards for the next three years, according to their attorneys.
Promotion boards “must not consider any adverse information related solely to COVID-19 vaccine refusal in cases in which a religious accommodation was requested,” according to a release from the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit legal organization that defends religious liberties, and the law firm Hacker Stephens LLP.
The Navy also agreed to review the personnel records of all plaintiffs to ensure that the service expunged any information on administrative separation, counseling or nonjudicial punishment for failing to comply with the mandate.
It will also correct the records of members who left the service and post a public statement “affirming the Navy’s respect for religious service members,” among other requirements.
Colorado Ramps Up Bird Flu Response, Requires Milk Testing
Colorado began requiring dairies to test milk supplies for bird flu every week, the state’s veterinarian told Reuters on Tuesday, as a federal team arrived to help investigate an escalating outbreak in cows that has spread to chickens and people.
The state’s new mandate aims to identify additional farms that could be infected and spread the disease to other dairies or poultry flocks, after the largest cluster of human cases to date in the United States occurred on a Colorado farm this month.
Bird flu infections linked to dairy cows have wiped out 3.1 million egg-laying chickens in Colorado in recent weeks, and poultry workers also tested positive.
Colorado has confirmed infections in 47 dairy herds since the U.S. outbreak in cows began in late March, with about 60% of its cases detected in the past month, according to U.S. data. Nationally, 13 states have reported infections in about 168 herds since spring.
A Judge Rules That Yes, the Biden Administration Was Trying to Censor People Online
For free speech advocates, there are few images more chilling than that of Nina Jankowicz singing her now-infamous tune as “the Mary Poppins of Disinformation.” The woman who would become known as the “Disinformation Czar” sang a cheerful TikTok parody of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to rally people to the cause of censorship.
When the press caught wind of President Biden’s plan to appoint Jankowicz as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s new “disinformation board,” Fox News said she “intended to censor Americans’ speech.” The backlash was swift. Plans for the board were suspended, and Jankowicz resigned in 2022. She then sued Fox News for defamation.
On Monday, the case was dismissed. But Chief Judge Colm Connolly didn’t just say it was legally unfounded — he demolished the claims of figures like Jankowicz that they are really not engaged in censorship.
Connolly made fast work of that effort. After holding that people are allowed to criticize Jankowicz as protected opinion, the court added: “The Disinformation Governance Board was formed precisely to examine citizens’ speech and, in coordination with the private sector, identify ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ … that objective is fairly characterized as a form of censorship.”
COVID: Emergency Ends, Vaccine Mandates Lifted for Healthcare Workers in B.C.
More than two thousand B.C. healthcare workers who lost their jobs because they refused a COVID-19 vaccine will now be allowed to return to work, after the B.C. government announced it was ending the public health emergency.
Dr. Bonnie Henry, the provincial health officer, made the announcement Friday morning in Victoria along with Health Minister Adrian Dix. Henry said they were rescinding the public health emergency and lifting all the remaining orders, including the vaccine mandate that was brought in in 2021 for healthcare workers.
Dix also announced a provincial regulation requiring all health workers to report their immunization status for all high priority pathogens of relevance.
That means doctors, nurses, and other health professionals will be required to report their vaccination status for COVID-19, influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, whooping cough, and chickenpox.
Google Scraps Plan to Remove Cookies From Chrome
Google is planning to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, it said on Monday, after years of pledging to phase out the tiny packets of code meant to track users on the internet.
The major reversal follows concerns from advertisers — the company’s biggest source of income — saying the loss of cookies in the world’s most popular browser will limit their ability to collect information for personalizing ads, making them dependent on Google’s user databases.
Since 2019, the Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit has been working on the Privacy Sandbox initiative aimed at enhancing online privacy while supporting digital businesses, with a key goal being the phase-out of third-party cookies.
Cookies are packets of information that allow websites and advertisers to identify individual web surfers and track their browsing habits, but they can also be used for unwanted surveillance.
