Tag: coronavirus

Hospital staff must swear off Tylenol, Tums to get religious vaccine exemption

A hospital system in Arkansas is making it a bit more difficult for staff to receive a religious exemption from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The hospital is now requiring staff to also swear off extremely common medicines, such as Tylenol, Tums, and even Preparation H, to get the exemption.

The move was prompted when Conway Regional Health System noted an unusual uptick in vaccine exemption requests that cited the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the vaccines.

“This was significantly disproportionate to what we’ve seen with the influenza vaccine,” Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, told Becker’s Hospital Review in an interview Wednesday.

“Thus,” Troup went on, “we provided a religious attestation form for those individuals requesting a religious exemption,” he said. The form includes a list of 30 commonly used medicines that “fall into the same category as the COVID-19 vaccine in their use of fetal cell lines,” Conway Regional said.

The list includes Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, aspirin, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, ibuprofen, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, albuterol, Preparation H, MMR vaccine, Claritin, Zoloft, Prilosec OTC, and azithromycin.

Conway Regional notes that the list includes commonly used and available drugs but that it is not an all-inclusive list of such medicines.

Employees are asked to attest that they “truthfully acknowledge and affirm that my sincerely held religious belief is consistent and true” and that they do not and will not use the medications and any others like them.

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The Left Discovers It Loves Evictions as Florida Landlord Challenges DeSantis by Evicting Unvaccinated Tenants

A major Florida landlord has announced it will evict current tenants who do not have proof of vaccination and will refuse to lease to new tenants who have not vaccinated.

If you’re not vaccinated for COVID-19, you can forget about moving into any of eight apartment complexes in Broward and Miami-Dade counties owned by Santiago A. Alvarez and his family.

And if you’re still unvaccinated when it comes time to renew your lease, you’ll have to find someplace else to live.

Alvarez, who controls 1,200 units in the two counties, is the first large-scale landlord known to national housing experts to impose a vaccine requirement not only for employees, but also for tenants. They’ll be required to produce documentation that they’ve received at least an initial vaccine dose.

The policy, which took effect Aug. 15, could set Alvarez’s company on a collision course with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ vaccine passport ban, which prohibits businesses from requiring that customers be vaccinated.

And yet the landlord might have exposed a loophole in the governor’s ban, forcing courts to decide whether a tenant is equivalent to a customer.

Alvarez says he’s not backing down. Signs posted at the leasing offices of his apartment complexes spell out the policy along with the words “Zero Tolerance.”

“We have to be concerned about our tenants and our employees,” Alvarez said in an interview. “All of these are private properties. We’re just trying to keep people safe and healthy. It’s going to cost us money, but we’re very firm on that.”

There is a lot going on here.

First up, the reaction by the left shows that they are immoral and slavishly devoted to polishing Biden’s shoes or whatever. In August, you’ll recall, the Supreme Court shut down the illegal “eviction moratorium” imposed by the CDC. This, we were told, was Armageddon.

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The Left’s Stubborn Refusal To Listen To The Other Side Is Anti-Intellectualism

Many mainstream outlets recently ran a fake news story about hospitals in rural Oklahoma being overrun by people overdosing on Ivermectin. The hospitals were indeed crowded, but there was no evidence, beyond the twisted testimony of one doctor, suggesting it was because of ignorant bumpkins ingesting horse dewormer.

Commenting on this story in The Federalist, Rachel Bovard points out how these journalistic mistakes consistently fall in one direction — against conservatives —and how the correction so many days or weeks later is buried behind other headlines. Also, as Bovard notes, it is clear that corporate media are “using their platform[s] as an advocacy tool for their ideological goals.” Even if the instance in question isn’t factually true, it is “morally right,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez notoriously said.

So what’s the narrative in this case? That conservatives are dumb and oppose science. They would rather take a drug intended for horses or cleaning aquariums than the vaccines developed by America’s greatest pharmaceutical experts.

But why perpetuate this narrative? What’s the goal? Even if it might be true (it isn’t), how does it benefit anyone to call half the country a bunch of morons? Will this really change their ways and help them become more progressive (as it’s satirically depicted in the show “South Park,” where the residents are shamed into building a Whole Foods in their small town), or will it simply push so many Americans away from public discourse? Do the people who push these narratives even care one way or the other how people respond?

Obviously, there’s tribalism at work in which one group vilifies and ridicules the rival to dominate them. There’s a great deal of satisfaction in “owning” or “dunking on” the other side. It makes for good entertainment and it creates a sense of belonging. Life may be bad, but it could be worse: you could be one of the idiots in Oklahoma overdosing on Ivermectin.

However, underneath this tribalism, there seems to be some genuine insecurity. In most cases, bullies resort to this kind of name-calling, scapegoating, and false narratives to make up for something lacking in themselves. After all, if they were confident in their ideas and in their ability to carry out those ideas, they would simply speak the truth and not feel the need to mock their rivals.

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About That ‘Man Died After Being Turned Away from 43 ICUs’ Over COVID Story

This is the latest round of fake news concerning COVID, huh? I’ve been told our hospitals are about to collapse. It hasn’t happened. In fact, this piece of fear porn has been manufactured before. It centers on Intensive care units, which are almost always near capacity, even prior to the pandemic. If they’re not, the hospital loses money.

Enter National Public Radio that peddled a story that wasn’t true at face value. The narrative was that the ICUs are so packed with COVID patients that it resulted in his death. He reportedly visited 43 and was turned away. It wasn’t COVID that killed him; it was a heart ailment. Yet, midway through the story, you can see where things go off the hinges. It’s classic misinformation (via NPR) [emphasis mine]:

Ray DeMonia, 73, was born and raised in Cullman, Ala., but he died on Sept. 1, some 200 miles away in an intensive care unit in Meridian, Miss.

Last month, DeMonia, who spent 40 years in the antiques and auctions business, suffered a cardiac emergency. But it was because hospitals are full due to the coronavirus — and not his heart — that he was forced to spend his last days so far from home, according to his family.

“Due to COVID 19, CRMC emergency staff contacted 43 hospitals in 3 states in search of a Cardiac ICU bed and finally located one in Meridian, MS.,” the last paragraph of DeMonia’s obituary reads, referring to the Cullman Regional Medical Center.

“In honor of Ray, please get vaccinated if you have not, in an effort to free up resources for non COVID related emergencies … ,” the obituary reads. “He would not want any other family to go through what his did.”

NPR was unable to reach the DeMonia family. A spokesperson for Cullman Regional Medical Center, who declined to give specifics of Ray DeMonia’s case, citing privacy concerns, confirmed to NPR that he was transferred from the hospital but said the reason was that he required “a higher level of specialized care not available” there.

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CNN’s Don Lemon calls on Americans to shun ‘stupid’ unvaccinated people: ‘Leave them behind’

CNN host Don Lemon called on Americans to shun “stupid” unvaccinated people on Wednesday, saying they should be left behind because they were “harmful to the greater good.”

During a discussion with fellow CNN host Chris Cuomo at the start of his show, Lemon blasted those choosing not to take the vaccine because they weren’t sure about its contents by oddly comparing it to Botox injections and people being unaware of what was in them, but taking them regardless.

“I think we have to stop coddling people when it comes to … the vaccines, saying ‘Oh you can’t shame them. You can’t call them stupid.’ Yes, they are. The people who aided and abetted Trump are stupid because they believed his big lie,” Lemon said, making an unclear comparison between former President Donald Trump and ongoing vaccine hesitancy within some communities. “The people who are not getting vaccines who are believing the lies on the internet instead of science, it’s time to start shaming them or leave them behind.”

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