Tag: coronavirus

Disabled child removed by police from AMC theater for failing to wear a mask

A video recorded in Jacksonville, N.C. appears to show the manager of an AMC movie theater refusing to allow a reportedly disabled child from entering the theater without a mask, and calling the police to escort her distraught family from the scene.

The child, who was in a stroller at the time of the incident, is reportedly non-verbal and has a condition that precludes her use of a mask or face shield. The child’s family members were all wearing masks.

Police officers were ultimately asked to escort the upset family from the theater. 

The Jacksonville, N.C. Police Department and the AMC Theatres chain did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Public health policy surrounding the use of masks on toddlers and children has become a subject of controversy over the last several months. Throughout the pandemic, there have been countless stories of families being thrown off flights or having flights canceled altogether because a baby was failing to don the required facial covering.

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More than 1.5 billion masks believed to have entered oceans in 2020

For months, we’ve seen face masks in places they shouldn’t be: storm drains, streets, beaches, and parks.

Now, we’re learning just how many could be flooding our oceans.

“Once plastic enters the marine environment, it’s very difficult to move,” said Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff, director of research for OceansAsia.

The marine conservation group has been tracking the number of face masks washing up on a remote island south of Hong Kong since the pandemic started.

“About six weeks after COVID hit Hong Kong, so late February, we began finding masks, and lots of masks,” said Bondaroff. “What’s remarkable is we weren’t finding face masks before COVID.”

Masks are made with polypropylene, which Bondaroff describes as thin fibers of plastic.

“The fact that we are starting to find masks that are breaking up indicates that this is a real problem, that microplastics are being produced by masks,” he said.

These tiny pieces of plastic can remain in the ocean for hundreds of years, threatening fish and even polluting the air.

“The question that we couldn’t answer was how many are entering our oceans? We just didn’t know,” said Dr. Bondaroff.

OceansAsia launched a study to find the answer and recently shared its findings.

Of the estimated 52 billion masks manufactured globally in 2020, it’s believed 1.56 billion will enter our oceans this year, resulting in an additional 4,680 to 6,240 metric tonnes of marine plastic pollution

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Spain Plans A “Registry” For Those Who Refuse COVID Vaccine

As Europe begins vaccinating the first wave of high-priority patients, a “glitch” has already emerged: many health-care workers and others have refused to take the vaccine, as skepticism and suspicion remain elevated.

A similar phenomenon has played out in the US, but to a less intense degree. But the situation, which we discussed last night, is now one of a variety of reasons, from a shortage of supplies and raw materials, to an uncooperative populace, that public-health officials are growing worried about hitting lofty vaccination targets.

And so, in Spain at least, government bureaucrats are fighting back, as Health Minister Salvador Illa warned the country would set up a “registry” for everybody who refuses the vaccine.

“What will be done is a registry, which will be shared with our European partners… of those people who have been offered it and have simply rejected it,” he said.

“It is not a document which will be made public and it will be done with the utmost respect for data protection.”

He added that the registry would not be made public, or delivered to employers, which begs the question: why else would the government keep a database of that information?

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Fauci says he altered public scientific estimates based on opinion polls

At the outset of the pandemic, Fauci — like most public health authorities — advised against wearing face masks, telling the public that doing so was unnecessary unless an individual was showing symptoms of COVID-19. 

Fauci in subsequent weeks and months made a sharp 180-degree turn on the subject of masks, advocating their universal usage and arguing that mask-wearing is critical to stopping the spread of COVID-19. 

When pressed in June on why he had initially argued against masks, Fauci said that the public health community was “concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”

“And we wanted to make sure,” Fauci continued, that the scarce PPE was reserved for “the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in [harm’s way], to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.” 

In a September interview with ABC, Fauci repeated this admission. 

“Very early on in the pandemic, in the very early months, before we even had many cases,” he said, “… there was a shortage of PPE and masks for health care providers who needed them desperately since they were putting their lives and their safety on the line every day.

“So the feeling was that people who were wanting to have masks in the community, namely just people out in the street, might be hoarding masks and making the shortage of masks even greater. In that context, we said that we did not recommend masks.”

Fauci claimed that, in addition to allegedly discovering that masks were effective at stopping the spread of viruses, scientists earlier this year also reportedly discovered that “cloth coverings worked as well as surgical masks.”

“So the idea of a shortage of masks that would take it away from those who really need it was no longer there because anybody could get a mask,” he said. 

Fauci’s office did not respond to emails over the weekend seeking comment.

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Biden Plans to Invoke Law That Will Send Operation Warp Speed into Overdrive, Advisor Reveals

President-Elect Joe Biden plans to invoke federal law to increase the production of vaccines to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Biden advisor said Monday on CNBC.

“You will see him invoking the Defense Production Act,” Dr. Celine Gounder said on Squawk Box in response to a question about what “policy levers could be pulled that haven’t yet already been tried.”

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12,000 NYC Students Banned From School For Not Consenting To Random Covid Testing

Today in “how far can your rights be infringed upon before people start to push back” news…

About 12,000 New York City students are being prevented from attending in-person learning because their parents “failed to sign consent forms for weekly random testing”, Bloomberg reported last week. The students are part of a larger group of 190,000 pre-school through elementary students who returned to classrooms in December. 

While about 60,000 pre-school and kindergarten students are exempt from testing, there are still about 130,000 students who are required to participate in random testing. 

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Mask Mandates Seem to Make CCP Virus Infection Rates Climb, Study Says

Protective-mask mandates aimed at combating the spread of the CCP virus that causes the disease COVID-19 appear to promote its spread, according to a report from RationalGround.com, a clearinghouse of COVID-19 data trends that’s run by a grassroots group of data analysts, computer scientists, and actuaries.

Researchers examined cases covering a 229-day period running from May 1 through Dec. 15 and compared the days in which state governments had imposed mask mandates and the days when they hadn’t.

In states with a mandate in effect, there were 9,605,256 confirmed COVID-19 cases, which works out to an average of 27 cases per 100,000 people per day. When states didn’t have a statewide order—including states that never had mandates, coupled with the period of time masking states didn’t have the mandate in place—there were 5,781,716 cases, averaging 17 cases per 100,000 people per day.

In other words, protective-mask mandates have a poor track record so far in fighting the coronavirus. States with mandates in place produced an average of 10 more reported infections per 100,000 people per day than states without mandates.

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Last man to share jail cell with Jeffrey Epstein died last month of COVID

The last man to share a cell with Jeffrey Epstein died last month in a Bronx apartment after catching coronavirus at a jail for cooperating witnesses.

Efrain “Stone” Reyes, 51, was found dead in bed on Nov. 27 at his mother’s apartment, the NYPD confirmed. In August 2019 he shared a cell with Epstein, only to be transferred to the privately-run Queens Detention Facility the day before the accused sex trafficker hanged himself, according to his family and Bureau of Prisons records.

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Moderna COVID-19 vaccine may cause side effects for those with cosmetic facial fillers: FDA

People with cosmetic facial fillers could experience swelling and inflammation with one of the coronavirus vaccines, the FDA advisory committee noted.

According to the committee, several trial participants with fillers have already experienced side effects. A California-based dermatologist said the reaction was immunological, ABC7 reported on Thursday.

“Your immune system which causes inflammation is revved up when you get a vaccine, that’s how it’s supposed to work,” said Dr. Shirley Chi, who noted the side effects were easily treated by medical personnel.

“So it makes sense that you would see an immune response in certain areas where they see some substance that is not a naturally occurring substance in your body.”

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