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Birx travels, family visits highlight pandemic safety perils

As COVID-19 cases skyrocketed before the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, warned Americans to “be vigilant” and limit celebrations to “your immediate household.”

For many Americans that guidance has been difficult to abide, including for Birx herself.

The day after Thanksgiving, she traveled to one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware. She was accompanied by three generations of her family from two households. Birx, her husband Paige Reffe, a daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren were present.

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Fish are becoming easier to catch ‘because traces of anti-depressants are getting into water supply and making them more relaxed’

Sleeping pills may be disturbing river ecosystems by turning fish into greedy, risk-taking loners, say researchers.

Scientists studied the behaviour of perch exposed to a sedative which is carried into waterways through sewage.

The drug, a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety and insomnia called oxazepam, made the fish bolder and less social.

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CDC Issues New Guidelines, Launches Probe After 1000s Negatively-Affected Following COVID-19 Vaccination

As of Dec. 18, 3,150 people reported what the agency terms “Health Impact Events” after getting vaccinated.

The definition of the term is: “unable to perform normal daily activities, unable to work, required care from doctor or health care professional.”

As The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber reports, the people reporting the negative effects reported them through V-safe, a smartphone application. The tool uses text messages and web surveys to provide personalized health check-ins and allows users to quickly tell the CDC if they are experiencing side effects.

The CDC and Pfizer, which produces the vaccine with BioNTech, didn’t respond to request for comments.

The information was presented by Dr. Thomas Clark, a CDC epidemiologist, to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent panel that provides recommendations to the agency, on Saturday.

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Russian scientist working on COVID-19 vaccine plummets to death in St. Petersburg

A prominent Russian scientist who was working on a COVID-19 vaccine was found dead with a stab wound after plummeting out his window in St. Petersburg, according to news reports.

Alexander “Sasha” Kagansky, 45, was in his underwear when he fell to his death from his 14th-floor apartment, according to the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.

The scientist also suffered a stab wound, police said.

Police believe there was a scuffle before Kagansky fell from the building, reports said.

Russian police say they are investigating Kagansky’s death as a possible homicide and questioning a 45-year-old man as a potential suspect, e2news.com said.

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DHS Works to Improve Biometric Scanning of Masked Faces

Perhaps the most-worn accessories of 2020, face masks mark an unexpected new constant in people’s lives providing necessary protection against COVID-19—but they’re also known to pose some trouble for contemporary facial recognition systems. 

The Homeland Security Department, one of the government’s biggest biometrics systems users, is now steering research to confront the complexities limiting existing technology and help push forward tools to safely verify people’s identities at security checkpoints in a pandemic.    

Initial results from one recent effort “are actually quite promising,” according to Arun Vemury, director of DHS’ Biometric and Identity Technology Center. 

“We’re getting to the point with this technology, where at least from the preliminary results, it looks like there’s some combinations of biometric acquisition systems, the camera systems and the matching algorithms—when you combine them together, you could match eight or nine out of 10 people without asking them to remove their masks,” Vemury told Nextgov during a recent interview. “This means that for the vast majority of people in airports, they might not have to remove their masks anymore to even go through the security checks, and we could do a really good job of still matching them. So, I think it’s very promising from that perspective. Is it 100%? Is it perfect? No. But it reduces the number of people who potentially have to take their masks off.”

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How a Young Joe Biden Became the Architect of the Government’s Asset Forfeiture Program

Biden, a young Senator from Delaware, had to do something to show that despite his “liberal” reputation, he could be just as tough on crime as his Republican colleagues. He took notice of the RICO law, and he realized that law enforcement agencies were not taking advantage of it, particularly in regards to the Drug War. He turned to the General Accounting Office and asked them to produce a study on the potential uses of RICO for drug enforcement.

The report showed that the RICO Act granted enormous powers to police to confiscate drug-related assets, but these powers were not being taken advantage of: “The government has simply not exercised the kind of leadership and management necessary to make asset forfeiture a widely used law enforcement technique,” the report stated. By the time the report came in, Ronald Reagan was settling into office and getting ready to wage a renewed War on Drugs.

Reagan brought the FBI into the Drug War, and he gave the director, William Webster, a mission. His agents would use the RICO Act powers to find drug rings and take away their assets. Drug cartels must be rendered unprofitable.

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2020: The Year We Let Ourselves Be Infantilised And Dehumanised

“Stay Alert. Control the Virus. Save Lives.”

What on earth is this actually supposed to mean?

Stay Alert? For what? Are we supposed to be on our guard for a virus that is approximately 120 nanometres, or around 1,000th the width of a human hair? Are we to carry an electron microscope around with us wherever we go, just in case? One of my favourite signs is an electronic one I sometimes see on my occasional drives into the office. On one day, it says, “Stay Alert. Control the Virus.” On another, it says, “Stay Alert. Watch out for Cyclists.” It should be noted that cyclists are considerably bigger than 120nm and even often wearing the kind of hi-vis jackets that coronaviruses refuse to wear.

Control the Virus? Say what? You mean they actually think we’re stupid enough to think they’re clever enough to devise schemes that can actually control those little invisible 120 nm virus particles that are in the air and on surfaces. Apparently so.

Save Lives? I am yet to hear a convincing argument as to how I and my family, not having any symptoms and thus not being infected by the virus, can possibly stop the spread of said virus that we don’t have by staying at home or wearing a piece of cloth over or respiratory passages, such that we save lives.

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