Tag: coronavirus

Biden Urges States To Maintain Mask Mandates As A ‘Patriotic Duty’

President Joe Biden urged leaders across the country Monday to reinstate mask mandates and pause reopening efforts, claiming it’s “the only way we will ever get back to normal.”

“I’m reiterating my call for every governor, mayor, and local leader to maintain and reinstate the mask mandate,” Biden said. “Please, this is not politics. Reinstate the mandate if you let it down. And businesses should require masks as well … Look, as I do my part to accelerate the vaccine distribution and vaccinations, I need the American people to do their part as well.”

Biden said mask mandates are the “only way” Americans will be able to attend events like graduations and weddings again.

“Mask up. Mask up. It’s a patriotic duty,” he said. “It’s the only way we will ever get back to normal. To cheer together in stadiums full of fans. To gather together in holidays again safely.”

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Amish community may have reached COVID ‘herd immunity,’ health official says

An Amish community in Pennsylvania may have become the first group in the US to achieve herd immunity, a local health official claims.

The administrator of a medical center in the heart of Lancaster County’s New Holland Borough, which is known for its Amish and Mennonite communities, estimates that as many as 90 percent of the religious families have had at least one family member infected with the virus.

“So, you would think if COVID was as contagious as they say, it would go through like a tsunami; and it did,” said Allen Hoover, an administrator of the Parochial Medical Center, which caters to the religious community and has 33,000 patients.

The Amish and Mennonite groups initially complied with stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the pandemic — shuttering schoolhouses and canceling church services.

But by late April, they had resumed worship services, where they shared communion cups and holy kisses, a church greeting among believers.

Soon after, the virus tore throughout the religious enclave.

“It was bad here in the spring; one patient right after another,” said Pam Cooper, a physician’s assistant at the Parochial Medical Center.

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Government Minister Says People Should “Call Out” Others For Hugging Their Loved Ones

A government minister appeared on morning television to urge Brits to “call out” others if they were seen engaging “in an odd way,” such as hugging their loved ones.

Yes, really.

Nigel Huddleston, the UK’s minister for tourism and sport, made the remarks during an interview spot on BBC Breakfast.

“Despite the temptation, please don’t risk the health of your loved ones by actually hugging them,” said Huddleston, before going on to suggest that people should intervene if they witness such dreadful behavior.

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The media’s false narrative about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally being a COVID-19 superspreader event

One of the largest motorcycle rallies in the world was still held in Sturgis, South Dakota, during the COVID-19 pandemic last summer, which the media claimed led to more than 266,000 COVID-19 cases, or nearly one in five of every case reported in America at the time. 

The number of cases came from a study by San Diego State University professors published in September, just a month following the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. 

However, the Sturgis city manager, Daniel Ainslie, said the study and other models that predicted their hospitals would be overwhelmed were wrong. 

“I think at the peak during the rally, and even after the rally, about five percent of the [hospital] beds were used for COVID,” Ainslie told Sharyl Attkisson on her show, Full Measure After Hours.

The media linked anywhere from one to about five fatalities to Sturgis, but Ainslie said none were scientifically traced.

“The hard data showed that there were about 260 cases that came from here,” Ainslie said. “Now, the reality was there were probably some additional cases beyond those 260 that were immediately traced here, but to try to state that there were a quarter million, that’s just ridiculous, and it was fanciful, and it was just pushing their narrative.”

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analyzed the San Diego State University study.

“Results from this study should be interpreted cautiously,” analysts write, adding that “the associated data analyses used to obtain nationwide estimates were relatively weak.”

Last year, 460,000 bikers attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, but that was fewer than usual. Although, Ainslie said, the media used footage from previous years to make it look busier than it actually was. 

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Nation’s first ‘vaccine passport’ coming to New York

The nation’s very first “vaccine passport” is coming to the Big Apple. 

The program, dubbed the “Excelsior Pass,” is an app that will allow New Yorkers to prove their vaccination status, or recent history of a negative COVID-19 test, in order to gain entry to events and businesses, Governor Cuomo announced in a news release Friday.  

“Similar to a mobile airline boarding pass, individuals will be able to either print out their pass or store it on their smartphones using the Excelsior Pass Wallet app,” the news release explains. 

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FAUCI DOES DAMAGE CONTROL AFTER FMR. CDC DIRECTOR SUSPECTS WUHAN LAB LEAK

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield says that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, did not originate from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and instead escaped from a nearby lab which was performing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses to make them more easily infect humans.

“I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human,” Redfield told CNN‘s Sanjay Gupta in an interview set to air Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET. “Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonot to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more & more efficient in human to human transmission.”

“It’s only an opinion; I’m allowed to have opinions now,” he added.

When asked how he believes the lab was working to make the virus infect humans more efficiently, he said “Let’s just say, I have a coronavirus, and I’m working on it — most of us in the lab are trying to grow virus. We try to make it grow better and better and better and better, so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That’s the way I put it together.”

Redfield, a virologist picked by former President Trump to lead the Centers for Disease Control, said he believes that the pandemic began as a localized outbreak in Wuhan in September or October of 2019, earlier than the official timeline, and that it spread to every province in China over the ensuing months.

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