Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
U.S. Truckers Slam Facebook for Removing Page Organizing DC Freedom Convoy: ‘Censorship at Its Finest’
American truckers are following Canada’s lead and organizing a protest against vaccine mandates. The U.S. group’s Facebook page, however, was removed early Wednesday in a move that the organizer called “censorship at its finest.”
The group, titled “Convoy to DC 2022,” acted as a place for truckers to plan and coordinate their trek from California to Washington, DC.
Jeremy Johnson, who set up the Facebook group, said his personal account was also removed, prompting him to contact a civil rights attorney to discuss the next steps. “They like to silence people that speak the truth,” Johnson said of his Facebook ban.
The group’s goal is to end vaccine mandates through peaceful protests. “The government needs to really take a look at what the American people want,” Johnson said. “And they don’t want mandates.”
U.S. Army Starts Kicking out COVID Vaccine Refusers After Over 3,000 Soldiers Got in Trouble for Not Getting the Shots
The U.S. Army will begin separating soldiers who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine in accordance with a new directive announced by Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth on Wednesday.
The order to commanders to begin involuntary separation of unvaccinated soldiers applies to all regular Army soldiers, as well as cadets and active-duty reservists, who do not have an accepted or pending exemption request, according to an Army statement.
The Army has already issued 3,073 general officer written reprimands for vaccine refusers and relieved six Army leaders of command, including two battalion commanders; however, no soldier had been discharged from the Army for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine as of Jan. 26.
North Carolina Man Would Rather Die Than Take COVID Vaccine for Transplant
A Burke County man will not get the COVID-19 vaccine even if it means he will die, because it’s a requirement to get a kidney transplant he desperately needs.
Chad Carswell, a U.S. Air Force veteran, is afflicted with multiple health conditions and is a double-amputee. He says his kidneys are functioning at about 4%, making his need for a transplant dire.
He went through the process at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist in Winston-Salem in an effort to get a transplant, but stopped in his tracks when he was told a COVID-19 vaccine was a requirement to get an organ transplant.
He says he supports the choice of getting the vaccine, but not any mandate to do so.
Lockdowns Only Reduced COVID Mortality by .2%, Study Finds: ‘Lockdowns Should Be Rejected out of Hand’
Lockdowns during the first COVID-19 wave in the spring of 2020 only reduced COVID-19 mortality by .2% in the U.S. and Europe, according to a Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of several studies.
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,” the researchers wrote. “In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
The researchers — Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve Hanke, Lund University economics professor Lars Jonung, and special advisor at Copenhagen’s Center for Political Studies Jonas Herby — analyzed the effects of lockdown measures such as school shutdowns, business closures, and mask mandates on COVID-19 deaths.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb Says It’s Time to Consider Dumping School COVID Mask Mandates
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should adjust its COVID-masking guidance to account for high-immunity protection in America, specifically when it comes to schools, Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Wednesday.
“We’re going to probably have to tolerate, and probably should, a higher level of baseline spread at the point at which we consider withdrawing some of this mitigation,” said Gottlieb, a current board member at COVID vaccine maker Pfizer, which has recently requested that the FDA clear two-dose vaccinations for children 6 months to 5 years old.
Gottlieb said the U.S. shouldn’t wait until what the CDC considers low prevalence in a community — less than 10 cases per 100,000 people per day — to end masking students, teachers, staff and school visitors.
Nearly 4K Unvaccinated NYC Workers Face Firing Next Week Amid Slowdown in COVID Shots
Mayor Adams to city workers: Get vaccinated or get lost.
The Adams administration has alerted nearly 4,000 unvaccinated municipal employees — including cops and firefighters — that they will lose their jobs if they do not get their coronavirus shots by the end of next week.
Adams’ shot across the bow came in letters issued to the affected workers this week informing them that they have until Feb. 11 to get inoculated.
It was not clear which agencies the 4,000 targeted employees work for.
Panel OKs COVID Vaccine Mandate for Philly Police Officers
Philadelphia police officers will now need to have at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, or have submitted an exemption request, by Feb. 11.
A three-person panel comprised of a neutral lawyer, a city lawyer and a lawyer for the Philadelphia Police Department’s union on Tuesday approved the vaccine mandate following a legally required arbitration process. The arbiters’ decision represents a win for the city, which announced the mandate for all city workers in November of last year.
As well as providing proof of at least one dose of vaccine by Feb. 11, police officers will have to get their second shot within 14 days. The ruling does not apply to booster shots, which are not part of the city’s mandate.
Sheriff Lifts Vaccine Mandate for New Las Vegas Police Employees
Las Vegas Review-Journal reported:
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo has rescinded a mandate requiring new Metropolitan Police Department hires to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
In a Tuesday interview, Lombardo said he continues to encourage officers and other employees to get the vaccine. But with a recent dip in positive cases at the department, he lifted the vaccine mandate for new hires about a week ago.
Oahu Opens New COVID Isolation, Quarantine Facility
Officials on Hawaii’s most populous island of Oahu have opened a new facility for COVID-19 patients who need a place to isolate or quarantine.
The facility is the second of its kind on the island and will start with 26 units that can expand to 50, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Tuesday.
The first facility has 30 isolation units with 56 beds. That facility has been nearly full in recent weeks as the state has dealt with a record wave of Omicron cases.
WHO Warns Nations About Lifting COVID Restrictions
The director general of the World Health Organization warned countries against lifting their COVID-19 restrictions, saying “this virus is dangerous, and it continues to evolve before our very eyes.”
The WHO director general said he did not believe that nations needed to return to lockdowns to curb further spread of the COVID-19 pandemic amid the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, but he said that nations could not rely on vaccination alone to solve the pandemic.
Why the Prospect of the IRS Using Facial Recognition Is so Alarming
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is planning to require citizens to create accounts with a private facial recognition company in order to file taxes online. The IRS is joining a growing number of federal and state agencies that have contracted with ID.me to authenticate the identities of people accessing services.
The IRS decision has prompted a backlash, in part over concerns about requiring citizens to use facial recognition technology and in part over difficulties some people have had in using the system, particularly with some state agencies that provide unemployment benefits. The reaction has prompted the IRS to revisit its decision.
As a computer science researcher and the chair of the Global Technology Policy Council of the Association for Computing Machinery, I have been involved in exploring some of the issues with government use of facial recognition technology, both its use and its potential flaws.
Facebook Changed Its Name to Declare Itself a Metaverse Pioneer — but It’s Years Late to the Party
What currently exists in the metaverse realm isn’t much.
Take Decentraland, which launched in 2017 as one of the earliest movers in the metaverse. Many have compared it to Second Life, a 2000s-era virtual game that has been referenced as an early iteration of the pre-Zuckerberg, hyped-up metaverse.
What exists may be somewhat barren and awkward, but early entrants to the space want to be clear: Facebook, now known as Meta in an effort to declare itself a metaverse pioneer, was absent until now.
Google’s Found a New Way to Track Workspace Users
Heads up for all the Google Workspace users out there: starting at the end of next month, you’re going to need to take a few extra steps to delete your data off the platform.
Historically, Google users have been been able to tweak the ways the tech giant tracks them across the web using their “Web & Activity Settings,” which lets any Googler — on Workspace or otherwise — turn off the company’s ability to track their activity across different sites and services, their location, and more. Workspace admins were also able to automatically flip on and off activity tracking for the users in their organization.
That’s all changing on Mar. 29, according to a new FAQ posted on Google’s Workplace administrator forum. At the end of that month, the company will be adding a new feature — “Workspace search history” — that can continue to track these customers, even if they, or their admins, turn activity tracking off.
