by Greg Piper Governments and private entities are using a small rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants to juice interest in bivalent boosters that only 1 in 6 Americans have taken and to urge a return to routine masking, if not outright mandating new jabs and face coverings. What they aren’t…
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking a new COVID-19 strain, BA.2.86, a highly mutated variant that was discovered in Michigan last week as the first case of its kind in the country. The variant has been spotted in the United States, Denmark, Israel and the U.K. This variant is described as being a “variant under monitoring” by the World Health Organization (WHO).
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A federal judge denied the Biden administration’s attempt to pause an injunction that bars federal officials from communicating with social media companies for the purposes of censoring protected speech on Monday.
The Biden administration appealed Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty’s July 4 injunction on Wednesday, also requesting an emergency order to pause the injunction while the appeal is pending on Thursday night. Doughty denied the administration’s emergency order Monday, finding that plaintiffs would likely succeed in proving the government colluded with social media companies “to engage in viewpoint-based suppression of protected free speech.”
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health advisory for malaria after cases were found in Florida and Texas within the past two months, marking the first time in two decades that people acquired the disease from mosquitoes in the United States.
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President Joe Biden on Friday announced that he had selected former North Carolina Health and Human Services Secretary Mandy Cohen to serve as the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Dr. Cohen is one of the nation’s top physicians and health leaders with experience leading large and complex organizations, and a proven track-record protecting Americans’ health and safety,” Biden said in a statement, pointing to her management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the state and her role in expanding Medicaid.
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One of the last serious border enforcement policies left under the Biden administration is just days away from being removed.
If it can be believed, things look to become much worse at the southern border, where tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers are currently gathering.
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The friendly skies too often resembled “season’s beatings” shopping brawls during the pandemic, as the number of arguments and even fistfights surged on-board. Viral videos of the flight-and-fight mayhem frequently had a common denominator – the federal government’s mask requirement.
So it may come as little surprise that disruptions on commercial domestic flights have plummeted by 74% since the Biden administration’s mask mandate was  overturned by a federal judge in April. The current rate is 1.7 unruly passengers per 10,000 flights, down from 6.4 per 10,000 in February.
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One of the nation’s leading epidemiologists is declaring there is no basis for President Joe Biden to extend his emergency pandemic powers and that it is essential for insurers to release data showing deaths and injuries to those who have received COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus at the Yale University School of Public Health, told Just the News on Friday evening that federal agencies have epically mishandled the pandemic strategy by substituting theories and politics for science.
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Fiscal year 2023 is projected to be the most difficult year for military recruiting since the inception of the all-volunteer force in 1973. Every branch of the military is reporting extreme challenges in recruiting enough volunteers to fill their ranks. Not only are fewer people volunteering, but there are fewer eligible Americans to recruit as the prevalence of obesity grows and disqualifies an ever-increasing number from military service.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) may have scheduled in its meeting agenda for Wednesday and Thursday a vote on whether to recommend adding COVID-19 shots to the standard Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule.
The agenda’s wording is ambiguous, as Children’s Health Defense (CHD) President and General Counsel Mary Holland noted.
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The New York City Department of Education has fired another 850 teachers and aides for refusing to comply with its COVID vaccine mandate, bringing the total number of school staff terminated over the mRNA shots that have not prevented the spread of infection to 2,000.
Some 1,300 department employees agreed to comply with the vaccine mandate by September 5 after taking a year of unpaid leave with benefits, the New York Post reported. The department informed personnel they would have to be vaccinated by that date or be “deemed to have voluntarily resigned.”
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While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is only one example of an administrative federal agency run by unelected bureaucrats, it is one charged with ensuring Americans receive truthful health and safety information, a daunting role for an organization now engulfed with concerns about its credibility.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky wrote in a letter made public this week her agency did not conduct a type of analysis on reports made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) regarding COVID shots during 2021. Her agency, however, indicated otherwise in its documents and through some of its other representatives.
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A study purporting to debunk the theory that social contagion contributes to transgender identity has several fundamental flaws, according to experts who reviewed the study.
The study — ‘Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio Among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States’ — used findings from the flawed methodology to recommend that female adolescents who identify as trans be provided “gender affirming care,” a common euphemism in the activist community to describe chemical and surgical interventions for sex changes. The lead author of the study, Dr. Jack Turban, is himself a member of the LGBT community and an outspoken advocate for such interventions.
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Documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL) reveal “concrete evidence” of how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) colluded with the social media giants to promote the Biden administration’s COVID-19 propaganda and censor Americans’ free speech, AFL reports.
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The Biden administration’s messaging on immigration has created “confusion” that human smugglers and traffickers have exploited, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.
Giammattei said smugglers know it’s easier to get people into the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration as a family, and that smugglers have used children, whether biological or not, in order to get their clients across the border. He mentioned the Biden administration’s effort to codify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which prevents migrants brought to the U.S. as children from being immediately deported, as exacerbating the problem.
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The quality of evidence for the FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) of COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months is drawing scrutiny from high-profile doctors and academics, some of whom are asking the White House not to pressure parents to vaccinate.
With CDC seroprevalence data from February finding 75% of minors had natural immunity, more attention is going to the risk/benefit calculation of vaccines for the age group at lowest risk from COVID.
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American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was paid nearly half a million dollars during the 2021-2022 school year, a report from Americans for Fair Treatment stated Wednesday. Weingarten raked in six-figures while simultaneously pushing for schools to stay shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With teacher’s union dues, Weingarten is paid $449,562, the Americans for Fair Treatment report stated. Weingarten’s salary is about seven times more than the average high school teacher makes as of 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
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For two years and counting, the scientific and medical establishments have urged Americans at all risk levels to limit their exposure to the microbial world to effectively reduce the spread of COVID-19, rather than focus on protecting the vulnerable.
The unexpected surge of other pathogens starting last summer, however, has challenged the wisdom of frequent sanitizing, social distancing, remote work and education, and routine mask-wearing, especially applied to children.
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A Louisiana judge ruled Friday that President Biden must at least temporarily keep in place federal rule Title 42 that was activate by the Trump administration as a public health measure to limit immigration during the pandemic.
Judge Robert Summerhays, a Trump appointee for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, imposed the preliminary injunction against the lifting of the order while the case advances through the court system.
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U.S Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently asked the public how COVID-19 misinformation “in the digital information environment” had affected health outcomes, trust in the healthcare system and “likelihood to vaccinate,” among other issues.
According to vaccine and healthcare policy experts who joined with Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, the misinformation is coming from inside the house.
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After losing in court and receiving a nationwide injunction against the institution of the mask mandate, the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had a decision to make: accept the court’s decision and move on to other means to combat Covid-19 without resorting to mask mandates; try to start from scratch and put a mask mandate rule in place that might conform better with statutory requirements; or appeal the case.
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The Biden administration announced Monday it will no longer enforce a federal mask mandate on public transportation, including airplanes. The decision was announced after Federal Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the directive was unlawful, noting that the CDC had not sought public comment prior to its order—issued 14 months ago—and did not adequately explain its reasoning.
Following the court’s decision, four major airlines immediately announced they would drop mask requirements on all domestic flights.
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Four major U.S. airlines are ditching COVID-19 mask requirements after a federal judge in Florida on Monday struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate for air passengers and others mass travelers.
Several airlines, including United Airlines, Delta, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines announced that they were dropping the mask requirements for passengers and employees.
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When schools pivoted to remote learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the first casualty was kids’ mental health.
A new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzed teenagers’ mental health from January 2021 to June 2021. Compared with 2019, the study found that the proportion of mental health–related emergency department visits in 2020 increased by about 31% among kids aged 12–17 years.
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Border authorities are seeing a continued flow of migrants crossing into the U.S. that are from countries beyond Central America ahead of an expected surge when Title 42 ends.
Title 42, the Trump era order, which has resulted in the expulsion of over 1.7 million migrants, will end May 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Friday.
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House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) said Wednesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used “political science” and not “medical science” to collaborate with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to create guidance on the issue of reopening the nation’s government schools.
Appearing as a guest on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, Scalise referred to a report released by Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis that revealed a CDC official’s testimony confirming the nation’s top health agency coordinated with teachers’ unions at an “unprecedented” level to craft school reopening guidance, despite the CDC’s earlier claims that their coordination with the unions was routine.
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The government’s sustained pressure on social media platforms to censor and report purported COVID-19 misinformation amounts to “state action” that violates the First Amendment, according to a lawsuit filed Friday on behalf of three Twitter users.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a frequent litigant against COVID-related administrative action, is representing theoretical cognitive scientist Mark Changizi, lawyer Michael Senger and stay-at-home father Daniel Kotzin.
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COVID-19 spreads primarily through aerosols, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said in a blog post Wednesday that puts it at odds with the CDC, according to a research center run by President Biden’s former COVID advisor Michael Osterholm.
The University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) said the White House was “years” behind some experts worldwide in recognizing the primacy of aerosol transmission. “It’s worth noting there is no mention of droplets in the blog post,” George Washington University public health epidemiologist David Michaels told CIDRAP.
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On Sunday, the chief executive officer of Pfizer said that Americans should be prepared to receive a second booster shot of the Coronavirus vaccine, which would mark the fourth overall shot that has been forced on the American public.
As reported by Politico, Albert Bourla made his remarks in an interview with CBS’ Margaret Brennan, where he said that his company was preparing to submit “a significant package of data about the need for a fourth dose” to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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In a letter to the House Speaker and Senate President Friday, President Joe Biden extended the national COVID-19 emergency pandemic indefinitely.
“There remains a need to continue this national emergency,” Biden wrote.
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U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Texas, represented by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the state of Texas are suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, challenging the constitutionality of its requirement that people wear masks on commercial airlines, conveyances, and at transportation hubs.
The lawsuit is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, TPPF said, where they think it will prevail. The statute being used to justify the CDC airline mask mandate is the same one used to justify the eviction moratorium over which TPPF sued and the Supreme Court struck down last year.
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Eight Michigan counties will end school mask mandates on or before Feb. 28, citing lower COVID metrics.
The Health Department of Northwest Michigan, which covers Antrim, Charlevoix, Emmet and Otsego counties, will repeal its mask mandate for schools on February 17, followed by Ingham County on February 19, and Oakland, Washtenaw, and Wayne County will drop their mask mandates on February 28.
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Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation, according to a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC).
MRC’s Free Speech America CensorTrack, an initiative that monitors acts of censorship across online platforms, identified over 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists and medical organizations were censored, according to the results of a study shared with Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Natural immunity from COVID-19 is broad and durable. The lowest risk group for COVID complications should get vaccines — and boosters, for those authorized — regardless of their health.
These statements came out of the CDC two days apart, illustrating the agency’s mixed messaging as ongoing research fails to show a meaningful effect on viral transmission from COVID interventions, especially in children.
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It’s time for Dr. Fauci to go.
That’s a tough sentence to write considering the important role he’s played in advancing crucial public health issues from advancing HIV/AIDS therapies to our battle against COVID-19. His Bobble Head was well-deserved. Please, don’t shoot the messenger.
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The recent arrival of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has, for far too many, reset the clock of our timeline for a return to societal normalcy.
Public health authorities in many countries reimposed loosened travel restrictions that had lapsed. Washington, D.C., under the mayorship of Muriel Bowser, passed a draconian private-sector vaccination mandate, the likes of which had previously only passed muster in iconic deep-blue metropolises such as New York City. The vacillating mandarins who constitute the “public health” apparatus in this country, such as Lord-Emperor Anthony Fauci, quickly began fearmongering about the need to avoid large gatherings for Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Restaurants and bars across the country that had shelved mask mandates suddenly deemed it necessary to make customers mask up again.
The sober reality, as should be obvious as we approach the two-year anniversary of “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” is that COVID-19 is simply not going anywhere; much like influenza or the common cold, it is now something humanity is simply going to have to deal with. Furthermore, at this point in the “pandemic,” it should be equally obvious that the COVID-19 vaccines are completely ineffective at preventing viral transmission. There is simply no compelling evidence that the vaccines are generally effective at slowing the spread. The vaccines often appear to be an effective symptom mitigation prophylactic for those who catch COVID-19, but that makes vaccination a quintessential private health decision with little-to-no relevance for public health authorities.
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President Joe Biden’s administration plans to provide millions of COVID-19 tests to K-12 schools each month, the White House said in a Wednesday statement.
This month, the Biden administration will start shipping five million rapid COVID-19 tests each month to K-12 schools across the country in an effort to keep schools open amid a spike in COVID-19 cases and the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant, according to White House officials. The new tests will allow schools to double the “volume of testing” from November 2021.
The administration also plans to expand lab capacity to provide an additional five million tests per month so schools can “perform individual and pooled testing in classrooms nationwide.”
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The Nasdaq Composite, a technology-heavy index of publicly-traded companies, is set to underperform the S&P 500 for the first time since 2016, according to CNBC.
The S&P 500, a stock market index consisting of the 500 largest publicly-traded companies in the U.S., climbed 28% in 2021 as of Monday, while the Nasdaq was up 23% on a year-over-year basis, according to CNBC. The S&P 500 previously beat the Nasdaq in 2016 and 2011.
The Nasdaq had a strong start to 2021, almost doubling the S&P 500 in February, CNBC reported. Trading slowed after the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines, which boosted sentiment among investors that the pandemic was ending, reducing demand for remote work technology and other tech-focused goods.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated the amount of time it recommends people isolate themselves after testing positive for COVID-19, shortening it from 10 days to five.
“Given what we currently know about COVID-19 and the Omicron variant, CDC is shortening the recommended time for isolation from 10 days for people with COVID-19 to 5 days, if asymptomatic, followed by 5 days of wearing a mask when around others,” the CDC said in a statement Monday.
The CDC changed the guidance because officials believe the data indicates the majority of COVID-19 transmission takes place early in the course of the illness, “generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after,” the statement said.
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Inflation, “softness” in the White House, and pandemic uncertainty make up some of the biggest risks to the U.S. economy in 2022, according to a Washington consulting firm.
“Every quarter, I take a macro look at trends driving politics and policy looking both backward and forwards and identify where key political risks may lurk and where political opportunities may present themselves,” Bruce Mehlman, former assistant secretary of Commerce in the George W. Bush administration, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The most recent analysis targets 2022 and identifies the emerging risks business and government leaders should anticipate and prepare for.”
A founding partner of the Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas, Mehlman advises prominent companies to understand and prepare for emerging trends and risks critical to the ever-evolving policy environment.
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The U.S. life expectancy dropped to its lowest level since World War II in 2020, multiple sources reported.
Life expectancy fell from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 years in 2020, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, NBC News reported.
The average life expectancy for males fell 2.1 years from 76.3 in 2019 to 74.2 in 2020, NBC News reported. Women’s average life expectancy decreased 1.5 years from 81.4 in 2019 to 79.9 in 2020.
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The federal agencies in charge of COVID-19 response are taking hits from former officials and high-profile medical professors for “sidelining experts,” not conducting basic research, and mischaracterizing evidence related to vaccines and masks for young people.
The Biden administration is getting a pass for “extreme political pressure” that “appropriately” prompted outrage against its predecessor, two FDA alumni wrote in The Washington Post Thursday.
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The CDC on Friday announced it will allow children who have been exposed to COVID-19 to remain in school if they test negative at least twice in a week, after interacting with an infected person.
The goal of the policy is to keep as many children in school as possible, given the actual risk of them contracting and spreading the illness.
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The Omicron variant has been detected in at least 19 states in the U.S., and is striking mainly fully vaccinated people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“Forty-three people in 19 states have tested positive for omicron, according to remarks made to the Associated Press by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 75 percent of those cases are in people who are fully vaccinated, and one person has been hospitalized. One-third of those individuals had traveled internationally; one-third had received a booster. The cases so far have been “mild,” she said.”
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Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that the definition of “fully vaccinated” might be changed by health officials to include COVID-19 booster shots if the data supports it.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that everyone aged 18 and older get booster shots six months after receiving either two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or one shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
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In response to a law firm’s query, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was unable to provide a single instance in which an unvaccinated person who’d previously had COVID-19 became reinfected with and transmitted the virus to someone else. The CDC said it does not collect such data, even though the medical freedom of millions of Americans hang in the balance.
A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September, many of them pushed out of the workforce by the unnecessary vaccine mandates.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the national public health agency of the United States, so it made sense that during a once-in-a-century pandemic the agency would be given a leading role. With that leadership, however, came limelight. And in so many ways during the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC, under the spotlight, undeniably flopped.
In his recently published book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb critiqued numerous aspects of the worldwide response to COVID-19. Many CDC actions garnered forceful rebukes. While Gottlieb recognizes that a lot of talented, smart, and dedicated individuals work within the CDC, he says it’s hard to deny that the respected governmental agency failed in a lot of vital respects. Here are six of them:
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published an “early release” study last week that uses a highly curated population to purportedly show that mRNA-vaccinated people have a much lower rate of reinfection by COVID-19 than naturally immune people, contradicting a much larger Israeli study this summer.
The CDC study concludes: “All eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.”
The study analyzed “COVID-19–like illness hospitalizations among adults” across nine states from January through Sept. 2. Because public health authorities portrayed vaccination as the best way to avoid hospitalization, it’s less likely that vaccinated people would seek hospitalization, thus hiding their breakthrough infections relative to the naturally immune.
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The Biden regime continues to use coercive tactics to get “the vast majority” of Americans vaccinated, even though the data suggests that the vaccines have done more harm than good.
More Americans have died with COVID-19 under Joe Biden’s watch than during the first year of the pandemic under President Donald Trump, data from John Hopkins University show.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday that they strongly recommend pregnant women get a COVID-19 vaccination.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended “urgent action” Wednesday for “people who are pregnant, recently pregnant … who are trying to become pregnant now, or who might become pregnant in the future” as 125,000 COVID-19 cases reported among pregnant women have resulted in 22,000 hospitalizations and 161 deaths.
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