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Vaccine Mandates at Work Part of ‘New Normal,’ Employers Say
About four in 10 employers have some type of COVID-19 vaccine mandate for their workers, according to a survey by Littler Mendelson P.C., marking a huge increase from the last time the management-side law firm polled companies on the issue.
The share of employers reporting they have inoculation requirements jumped eightfold from the percentage who said they had adopted such mandates in Littler’s August 2021 survey report. Less than 1% of companies reported having vaccine requirements in the firm’s survey report issued in February 2021.
The report released Wednesday shows employers increasingly have turned to vaccine mandates as the pandemic has dragged on for more than two years, killing nearly 1 million Americans and infecting more than 81 million.
U.S. CDC Says Travelers Should Still Wear Masks on Airplanes
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday recommended travelers continue to wear masks in airplanes, trains and airports despite a judge’s April 18 order declaring the 14-month-old transportation mask mandate unlawful.
The CDC said it based its recommendation on current COVID-19 conditions and spread as well as the protective value of masks.
The Justice Department last month filed notice it will appeal the ruling and it has until May 31 to do so. But the government has made no effort to seek immediate court action to reinstate the mandate.
The mask mandate had been due to expire on Tuesday just before midnight unless the CDC sought an extension of a Transportation Security Administration directive.
Even as COVID Cases Rise, Mask Mandates Stay Shelved
An increase in COVID-19 infections around the U.S. has sent more cities into new high-risk categories that are supposed to trigger indoor mask-wearing, but much of the country is stopping short of bringing back restrictions amid deep pandemic fatigue.
For weeks, much of upstate New York has been in the high-alert orange zone, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention designation that reflects serious community spread. The CDC urges people to mask up in indoor public places, including schools, regardless of vaccination status. But few, if any, local jurisdictions in the region brought back a mask requirement despite rising case counts.
“I don’t anticipate many places, if any, going back to mask mandates unless we see overflowing hospitals — that’s what would drive mask mandates,” said Professor David Larsen, a public health expert at Syracuse University in upstate New York, whose own county is currently an orange zone.
Mandates Disappear, but Mask Detection Tech Has Left Its Mark
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when mask mandates became commonplace both in public and in private, tech vendors began selling products they claimed could detect whether someone was wearing a mask — or not.
With press releases and flashy demonstrations, the vendors attracted the attention of critics skeptical about the solutions’ capabilities and potential surveillance applications. Allied Market Research optimistically predicted that the market would be worth over $1 billion by 2027.
While the demand for mask detection technologies is steadily declining, the products have had far-reaching effects with implications for privacy and security, interviews with vendors suggest.
As regular readers of this site are well aware, facial recognition is a flashpoint for controversy. While companies like Trueface claim that they engage only in “responsible” deployments of the technology, recent history is filled with examples of facial recognition abuse, such as software developed by Huawei and others to recognize members of the targeted Uyghur minority group.
California Pushes Ahead With Kids’ Online Safety Proposals as Washington Stalls
A California state panel advanced a proposal that would hold tech companies responsible for features that can be addictive and harmful, a measure that, if passed, could put California at the forefront of the fight for kids’ online safety as Washington stalls.
The bill would impose a duty for tech companies not to addict users 17 and younger and would make them liable for damages and civil penalties if they knowingly or negligently addict children to their products or services.
The bill is one of two Assemblymembers Jordan Cunningham (R) and Buffy Wicks (D) have put forward to push for kids’ safety regulation online. Earlier this year, they introduced the California Age Appropriate Design Code Bill, which would add further privacy and safety regulations for children online. That bill also advanced out of a committee with broad bipartisan support.
As Broadway Drops Audience Vaccine Mandate, Job Cuts Hit COVID Safety Workers
The Hollywood Reporter reported:
Starting this May, vaccination checks for audience members on Broadway will largely be a thing of the past.
And with the policy change, some positions within the theater industry will be mostly eliminated, including that of the workers checking patrons’ vaccination cards outside many of the theaters. The change comes after many Broadway theater owners elected to drop the vaccine mandate for audience members starting May 1.
Broadway’s mask mandate for audience members remains in place through at least May 31.
The vaccine requirement was put in place at all Broadway theaters in July 2021, ahead of the industry’s fall reopening and before New York’s citywide mandate. Now, almost all Broadway theaters have done away with that requirement — it remains in place at three theaters owned by nonprofit organizations — as the industry becomes one of the last in New York to ease pandemic safety measures.
Chicago Expected to Reach ‘Medium’ COVID Risk Soon; City’s Top Doctor Says Mask Rules Could Return if ‘High’ Level Reached
Chicago’s public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said Tuesday that she anticipates the city’s COVID-19 risk could jump from “low” to “medium” levels as early as Friday, following the raised risk levels in suburban Cook County last week.
But the increased risk level is not enough to trigger any new citywide mask mandates, she said. Last month, she suggested a medium-level designation could lead to a reinstated mask mandate at Chicago Public Schools, but on Tuesday, said masks would be “strongly recommended” in schools, as well as around the city.
“If we move to medium, it’s not like the sky is falling,” Arwady said during her weekly Facebook live streaming Q&A event.
‘This Board Is Unconstitutional and Un-American’: Sen. Cotton Leads GOP Lawmakers in Effort to Defund Biden’s ‘Disinformation Board’
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton introduced a bill on Tuesday that would ban federal funding from being used to launch President Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security.
Cotton was joined in the legislation with support from a team of 18 co-sponsors among the Senate’s Republicans.
“The Biden administration wants a government agency dedicated to cracking down on what its subjects can say, an idea popular with Orwellian governments everywhere. This board is unconstitutional and un-American — my bill puts a stop to it,” Cotton said in a statement.
Bill Gates Says Elon Musk Could Make Twitter ‘Worse’ — but That People Should Never Underestimate Him
Bill Gates said he’s unsure what Twitter‘s future will look like under Elon Musk’s guidance. “He actually could make it worse,” Gates said at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
The Microsoft founder expressed concern over how Musk may address misinformation on the social media platform, especially considering his emphasis on promoting “free speech.” Last week, Musk said that he defines free speech as “that which matches the law.”
“How does he feel about something that says vaccines can kill people or that Bill Gates is tracking people?” Gates said. “Is that one of the things he thinks should be spread?”
Facebook, Google Face Regulatory Reckoning That May End Big Tech Dominance
In February, the company formerly known as Facebook lost $232 billion in value in the stock market — the biggest loss ever suffered by a U.S. company in a single day, a plunge equal to the combined market values of Netflix and FedEx. By the end of April, the stock had lost another fifth of its value.
Meta Platforms, as the company is now formally known, can only wish that a brutal stock beating is its only problem. Meta faces serious threats on several fronts, and any one of them might prove existential. For the first time in its 18-year history, the number of people who use the once-ubiquitous-seeming Facebook social network has been dropping.
Privacy protections added by Apple last year to its phone software are hobbling Facebook‘s bread-and-butter ad business, which depends on keeping tabs on what users are up to. And the all-important youth market is shunning Facebook in favor of TikTok.
Meta is also facing a daunting level of ire, which is splashing over onto the rest of Big Tech — that is, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. These tech giants and Meta are facing scrutiny from regulators and legislators both in the U.S. and Europe.
Europe’s New Law Will Force Secretive TikTok to Open Up
Social networks grow up faster these days. It took Facebook eight years to reach 1 billion users, but TikTok got there in just five. The fast-growing short-video app also got squeezed by political and regulatory concerns at a younger age over its Chinese ownership and influence on teen mental health.
The pressure on TikTok is now set to jump higher still. The European Union’s recently agreed-upon Digital Services Act (DSA) places new restrictions on the largest platforms.
To date, TikTok has been less transparent and less thoroughly studied than Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. That’s partly because it is a much younger service, and fewer researchers and journalists have scrutinized its workings.
But TikTok has also not provided tools to enable researchers to study how content circulates on its platform, as Facebook and Twitter have done. When Europe’s new rules force all large social platforms to open up their data and even algorithms to outside scrutiny, our understanding of TikTok may change most of all.
