Tag: vaccines

Biden administration demands Facebook hands over data on “misinformation” and vaccine skeptics

The Biden administration continues to pressure Facebook to collaborate and help it achieve its goals, one of them being to counter COVID vaccine skepticism and get more people in the US vaccinated.

After Biden shockingly denounced Facebook and others as “killing people” because they are allegedly letting COVID misinformation run rampant on their platforms, that pressure now continues in media reports, like the one The Washington Post published, citing three anonymous administration sources.

According to them, The White House and Facebook have had a series of meetings whose aim was to get the social media giant to turn over massive amounts of user data to the government, apparently as a “good will gesture” – since there doesn’t seem to be any legal ground for such a request.

Instead, the “tense” meetings saw the administration’s COVID crew “begging” Facebook to give them access to data showing how many people on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp see content branded as coronavirus misinformation, how many are still undecided whether to get the jab, and also the efficiency of Facebook’s censorship algorithms, i.e., how many people still get to see content that it aims to block.

It’s not obvious why the officials quoted by the article thought Facebook was under obligation to do this, but they accused the company of “hiding, filibustering and deflecting” – while at the same time commending Google and Twitter for apparently being much more accommodating in similar meetings around the same subject.

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Dems Intro Bill Banning Unvaxxed Americans From Flying.

Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres unveiled a legislative effort to ban Americans opting to not get vaccinated against COVID-19 from taking domestic and international flights. 

The New York Congressman sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lobbying the agencies to only allow Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 on domestic and international flights.

He introduced a complementary bill in the House necessitating that “any individual traveling on a flight that departs from or arrives to an airport inside the United States or a territory of the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID–19.” It has since been referred to the Committee on Homeland Security, where he serves as the Vice-Chair.

“The TSA never allows people to enter planes or airports with a weapon, and the delta variant is a weapon,” Torres remarked. “It is a threat to everyone in an airport and everyone on a plane,” he added in defense of the bill.

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Facebook Caves, Bans Accounts Identified by White House

Facebook has taken action against the so-called “disinformation dozen,” a set of accounts publicly identified by the Biden White House as responsible for the majority of alleged coronavirus “disinformation” on the platform.

The Biden administration identified the accounts last month and publicly urged Facebook to take action against them. It appears Facebook has now succumbed to that pressure.

In a statement to CNN, a White House spokesperson said the administration would continue to push for more censorship from social media platforms, and continued to criticize Facebook.

“In the middle of a pandemic, being honest and transparent about the work that needs to be done to protect public health is absolutely vital, but Facebook still refuses to be straightforward about how much misinformation is circulating — and being actively promoted — on their platform,” said the spokesperson.

“It’s on everyone to get this right so we can make sure the American people are getting accurate information to protect the health of themselves and their loved ones — which is why the Administration will continue to push leaders, media outlets, and leading sources of information like Facebook to meet those basic expectations.”

Despite criticizing Facebook, the White House admitted last month that it is in regular contact with the platform to identify and remove posts.

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Hospital removed sick patients from transplant wait list after they refused to get the COVID vaccine: Report

A hospital in Washington state has reportedly removed multiple sick patients from its transplant wait list over their decision not to receive a coronavirus vaccine.

Conservative Seattle radio host Jason Rantz reported Tuesday that the University of Washington Medical Center has kicked “several patients” off its organ transplant list in recent months, citing an unofficial policy requiring transplant recipients to be vaccinated against the pathogen.

One of the patients, Derek Kovick, a 41-year-old man in need of a liver transplant, informed Rantz of the controversial hospital policy last week. Then shortly after, another patient, 64-year-old Sam Allen, came forward with his own story.

Allen, who suffers from a litany of heart-related medical conditions, told the radio host he had been on the hospital’s wait list for a heart transplant for more than two years. But in June, after doctors discovered that he was unvaccinated and had no plans to change that, he was informed that he would no longer be in line for the transplant.

He said it all started following a disagreement over mask-wearing at the hospital.

“The cardiologist called me, and we had a discussion, and he informed me that, ‘Well, you’re going to have to get a vaccination to get a transplant.’ And I said, ‘Well that’s news to me and nobody’s ever told me that before.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, that’s our policy,'” Allen recalled.

After he refused, the hospital sent him a letter in June informing him that he had been pulled from the United Network for Organ Sharing wait list for a heart.

“Your name has been removed from the waitlist at the University of Washington Medical Center,” the letter read. “This was done in follow-up to your recent conversation with providers regarding the heart transplant selection committee’s concerns about compliance with COVID-19-related policies and recommendations.”

The letter added that Allen’s situation could potentially be reassessed but only if he satisfied their “compliance concerns.”

According to Rantz, when he reached out to the UW Medical Center for an explanation, the hospital did not deny the allegations. Officials did, however, reject the notion that an official policy is on the books. But Rantz isn’t buying it.

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Weekly fees, Wi-Fi access loss: Quinnipiac lays out penalties for unvaccinated students

As Quinnipiac University requires students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 for the fall 2021 semester, students who did not request an exemption nor submit proof of vaccination will face consequences, according to Associate Vice President for Public Relations John Morgan’s email to The Chronicle.

Students who don’t comply with the mandate will face a weekly fee starting at $100 per week during the first two weeks. It will increase by $25 every two weeks up to a maximum of $200 a week. The fee can reach up to $2,275 for the entire semester.

The university will stop billing when students submit their proof of their first vaccination shot. If students become fully vaccinated by Sept. 14, they will not be charged.

Morgan said the university sent the email to around 600 students who have not yet uploaded any vaccination information.

Junior psychology major Danyella Kaplan said it is important for Quinnipiac to take vaccinations and protection against the virus seriously. While she said consequences for non-compliance are necessary, she questioned this move.

“Financial consequences do not seem to be the right answer that will actually have long-term benefits,” Kaplan said. “If students choose to be unvaccinated, having them take a class on the importance of practicing safety measures would be a more beneficial measure to take.”

The email states that students will lose access to Wi-Fi and the campus network if they fail to complete the vaccination mandate by Sept. 14.

As unvaccinated students are required to participate in weekly COVID-19 testing, there will be a $100 fee each time they miss a week.

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Australian Government To Seize 24,000 Children, Vaccinate Them Without Parents Present In Massive Stadium

The Australian government is going to seize 24,000 children from it’s citizens and place them in a stadium quarantine camp to be forcibly vaccinated. Parents will not be allowed to attend.

As was reported by the Daily Expose in the United Kingdom and Red State in the United States, Australia’s Brad Hazzard, the Minister for Health and Medical Research, has told parents in a press conference that 24,000 children will be sent to a stadium to get the experimental Covid-19 vaccine, and parents will not allowed to be present. Hazzard insisted to parents that their children would be “well looked after.”

Red State reported that “It should be noted that Australia has had strict vaccination laws since at least 2018. Parents can receive heavy fines and lose welfare benefits if they refuse to comply with the traditional vaccination schedule.”

Citizens will be charged with “on the spot” excessive fines up to $5,000 per infraction if they violate the tyrannical COVID-19 rules as their children get sent away to get forcibly vaccinated despite their protest as Australia conducts one of the most authoritarian military lockdowns to date.

Australian residents have received a letter from the Australian Government detailing how an “accommodation facility” will be used for mandatory quarantine “accommodation” called the Centre for National Resilience, Melbourne (the Centre) built at 135 Donnybrook Road. The first 500 beds will be completed by the end of 2021 and the facility will be equipped to increase to 3000.

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Free Society Dwindles as Permission Requirements Grow

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a bonanza for government officials, allowing them to extend authority that they then exercise with relatively little oversight or restraint in ways that would have been inconceivable in the past. It has accelerated the transformation of previously free societies into permission-based states, where things once done as a matter of right are now considered privileges to be dispensed or withheld by those in power. Case in point: the Biden administration reportedly discussed making travel within the United States conditional on vaccination status but is holding back out of fear that the public has yet to be sufficiently softened-up for such an intrusive restriction.

“While more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment,” the Associated Press reported last week after discussions with administration insiders. “That’s not to say they won’t be implemented in the future, as public opinion continues to shift toward requiring vaccinations as a means to restore normalcy.”

The AP emphasizes that “White House officials say Biden wanted to initially operate with restraint to ensure that Americans were ready for the strong-arming from the federal government.” The piece is unusually blunt in the glimpse it offers of an administration that embraces coercive measures to achieve its goals but is trying to co-opt businesses and localities as its proxies until Americans are more ready to do as they’re told.

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Americans are creating their own vaccine mandates by cutting ties with the unvaccinated

Americans are creating their own COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

According to new data from The Harris Poll, at least 30% of Millennials or Gen Zers in the U.S. say they have cut ties with a friend, family member or acquaintance because they wouldn’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.

The poll, which was provided first to Axios, surveyed 1,334 U.S. adults in August 2021, and categorized them by generation.

The poll shows that 33% of millennials say they have cuts ties with somebody in their life over not getting vaccinated against COVID-19, compared with 30% of Gen Zers, 9% of Gen Xers and 7% of baby boomers.

“It’s the new cultural dividing line,” John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, told Axios.

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