Day: January 31, 2021
Anxiety Grows as Long-Term Care Awaits COVID-19 Vaccines
Nurse Lacinda Snowberger gives Priscilla Lockhart a shot of the Pfizer vaccine at a walk-in COVID-19 vaccination POD inside a vacant Sears store at the Lake Square Mall. The appointment-only site for frontline health care workers and seniors 65 and older is vaccinating around 700 people a day. (Photo by Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
SEE: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/virus-outbreak-long-term-care/2021/01/31/id/1007958/;
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Frustration is building over the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations at long-term care sites, where some homes still await first shots while fending off a virus that can devastate their residents.
The major drugstore chains tasked with giving shots in these places are far along in vaccinating nursing home residents and staff. But some other types of group residences won't receive first doses until mid-February or later, despite being among the top priorities for shots.
CVS and Walgreens have started a massive vaccination push in nearly all states, and they say they are proceeding on schedule. But resident advocates and experts are anxious about delays in delivering vaccines that have been available for more than a month.
“Every week that you wait and you’re not vaccinating is a big deal here,” said David Grabowski, a health policy professor at Harvard Medical School. “My sense is that this process is still going too slow.”
Government officials placed long-term care residents and staff among their top vaccination priorities after they authorized the emergency use of shots from Pfizer and Moderna late last year. That includes both nursing homes, where residents get 24-hour-a-day medical care; assisted living facilities, where people generally need less help; and other types of group homes.
Vaccinations then proceeded quickly in some states like West Virginia, which didn’t rely on the drugstore chains and Connecticut.
But — as with other aspects of the rollout — the results have been choppy overall. In many places, home operators and residents' relatives have watched with frustration as states opened vaccine eligibility to other populations before the work in long-term care homes was finished.
Laura Vuchetich says her elderly parents live in a Milwaukee assisted living community and need shots badly. But they have been told they won’t get them until the middle of February even as pharmacies have started handing out hundreds of doses to younger people, including a friend of hers in good health.
“They’re supposed to be at the front of the line,” she said. “They’re in the mid-80s, and my mom had a heart attack last year. It’s just baffling to me.”
Such homes have been hit hard by the coronavirus.
A federal government study last fall found that an average of one death occurred among every five assisted living facility residents with COVID-19 in states that offered data. That compares with one death among every 40 people with the virus in the general population.
The government tasked CVS and Walgreens with administering the shots to long-term care locations in nearly every state. Each vaccine requires two shots a few weeks apart, and CVS and Walgreens say they have wrapped up first-dose clinics in nursing homes.
The chains plan three visits to each location. CVS spokesman TJ Crawford said most residents will be fully vaccinated after the second visit, and the vast majority of assisted living facilities and other residences will have their third visits by mid-March. Some clinics will wrap up in April.
While they wait, the people working and living in those locations are stuck in limbo, hoping the virus doesn’t spread to them or return, said Nicole Howell, who runs a California-based non-profit that advocates for long-term care residents.
“They are essentially standing at the front door fighting this disease with sanitizer and limited staff,” said Howell, executive director of Ombudsman Services of Contra Costa, Solano, and Alameda counties.
Severine Petras watched a COVID-19 outbreak develop at a Pennsylvania assisted living home her company operates a couple weeks before the first vaccines arrived. The Priority Life Care CEO said the recent outbreak hit a “significant” amount of staff and some residents, including one person who died.
Vaccine scheduling has been slow in that state, she said.
“We should have had at least one round of vaccinations in there," she said. “It would have helped tremendously.”
Petras said she's frustrated in part because it was widely known that COVID-19 cases would surge after the holidays. She wishes vaccines had been scheduled sooner to protect against that.
As of Sunday morning, 3.5 million doses have been given in long-term care facilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's about one-third of the roughly 10 million vaccines that Grabowski estimates will be needed to fully protect residents and employees.
“It almost feels like we went about this backwards where they contracted with the pharmacies and let set up the schedule versus saying, ‘Here’s the schedule that you need to meet,’” he said.
The drugstore chains have faced several challenges. At some locations, a high percentage of staff have declined the shots on the initial visits. The companies also had to set up thousands of clinics and reschedule some at locations where COVID-19 outbreaks developed.
CVS and Walgreens say states determined when they could start giving shots at assisted-living facilities, and they have finished first-dose clinics when they were allowed to begin in December. But other states didn’t allow them to start until mid-January. They also say they are pouring thousands of employees into the effort.
Even so, Grabowski and Howell say outside assistance still may be needed to speed up the effort in some areas.
In New York, the Empire State Association of Assisted Living contacted state regulators because some homes had initial clinics scheduled in March, Executive Director Lisa Newcomb said. Those clinic dates were then moved mostly to late January.
“We had some members who were very, very upset about having to wait until March,” she said.
In Florida, the state brought in an outside company to help deliver vaccines if the drugstore chains weren’t able to schedule a first clinic until late January.
Innovation Senior Living CEO Pilar Carvajal said the company called one of her homes that hadn’t had a clinic date set yet and showed up the next day to start delivering shots.
She said vaccinations should be complete at her six Florida assisted-living facilities by the end of March. Then she can stop worrying about employees bringing the virus to work after doing something as simple as going out to eat.
“That is the one thing we cannot control,” she said. “The sooner we can get vaccinated, obviously the safer we will be.”
Biden administration reverses Trump’s weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, UAE
BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy tweeted:
But he ignored Iran’s role in the Yemen civil war which started in 2014, “when Houthi insurgents—Shiite rebels with links to Iran and a history of rising up against the Sunni government—took control of Yemen’s capital and largest city.”
Weeks ago, Yemen pleaded for the UN, the international community and human rights organizations to “take a clear position on the war crimes and brutal violations committed by the Houthi militia in Yemen.”
Although Saudi Arabia is heavily engaged in the Yemen war, it does not take much insight to observe the Iranian regime’s trajectory if it is allowed to continue pursuing its objectives unimpeded. Iran is a perpetual menace and threat, which is why Trump took a stand against this common enemy by favoring Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Biden administration, on the other hand, is in the process of eroding Trump’s efforts as part of its very different “strategic objectives”; these include a re-engagement of the disastrous Iran deal while leaving Israel out of the talks. Iran is now waiting for the Biden Administration to lift sanctions.
The Biden administration has in effect continued along the same lines of the Obama administration, which strengthened Iran and weakened Israel and American interests.
Biden administration pauses arms sales to Saudi Arabia and UAE,” by Jennifer Hansler and Kylie Atwood, CNN, January 27, 2021:
Washington (CNN)The Biden administration has paused arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as it conducts a wider review of agreements worth billions of dollars made by the Trump administration, sources familiar with the matter told CNN Wednesday.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken confirmed that pending arms sales are under review, as is typical at the start of a new administration, “to make sure that what is being considered is something that advances our strategic objectives, and advances our foreign policy.”
He did not reference any specific sales or countries in his remarks, which were made at his first State Department news conference as top US diplomat.
The move to freeze the pending sales to the Gulf allies could signal a change in approach by the Biden administration after the Trump administration approved major sales in the last months of its tenure.
Gulf nations that have sales in the pipeline had expected some sort of pause for the administration to review but the practical impact isn’t clear yet, a source familiar with Gulf nations’ thinking said.
A State Department official earlier described the pause as “a routine administrative action typical to most any transition, and demonstrates the administration’s commitment to transparency and good governance, as well as ensuring US arms sales meet our strategic objectives of building stronger, interoperable, and more capable security partners.”…
Democrats in Congress immediately came out in favor of the move.
“The weapons we sold to Saudi Arabia and UAE have been used to kill schoolchildren, transferred to extremist militias, and fueled a dangerous arms race in the Middle East,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy. “This is the right move. The time is now to reset our relationships with Gulf allies.”….
Biden’s Pentagon to offer covid vaccines to 9/11 jihadis at Guantánamo before many Americans have access to them
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Priorities, priorities. But you see, they’ve got to have them so that they can resume “war crimes hearings at the base’s Camp Justice compound.” That raises another question: why are there still hearings being conducted regarding these men? Way back in 2009 they essentially confessed by publishing a lengthy Islamic defense of their actions. Why are they still waiting to be tried so many years later? Who is protecting them?
“Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay will be offered vaccination, the Pentagon says,” by Carol Rosenberg, New York Times, January 28, 2021:
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has decided to offer coronavirus vaccines to detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, possibly starting next week, according to a prosecutor in the case against five prisoners accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., wrote to defense lawyers on Thursday “that an official in the Pentagon has just signed a memo approving the delivery of the Covid-19 vaccine to the detainee population in Guantánamo.”…
Lack of vaccinations has been a major obstacle to resuming war crimes hearings at the base’s Camp Justice compound. It was not immediately known whether the defendants in the Sept. 11 case, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, would consent to be vaccinated….
________________________________________________________________________
UPDATE:
GOP Slams Biden on Vaccinating Gitmo Detainees; Pentagon Pauses Plan
SEE: https://www.newsmax.com/us/covid-vaccine-biden-gitmo/2021/01/30/id/1007921
Austria: Muslim gang of Sharia enforcers threatens to behead children
BY ROBERT SPENCER
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
“When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks…” (Qur’an 47:4)
“The moral guardian gang threatened children with beheading,” translated from “Sittenwächter-Bande drohte Kindern mit Enthauptung,” by Christoph Budin, Kronen Zeitung, January 24, 2021 (thanks to Medforth):
The notorious moral guardian gang of devout Muslim Chechens does not shy away from the brutal extortion of protection money. A father of two was threatened in Vienna with the beheading of his sons – police protection for the family and handcuffs for four young suspects!
The Caucasus gang – among them mostly recognized or tolerated war refugees – had already made headlines several times in the federal capital and Linz. Their compatriot women always had to wear headscarves. And if their behavior was too “Western” or, in their eyes, their values did not correspond (photos in swimwear or meetings with non-Chechen men were sufficient), the victims and their families were severely threatened and persecuted.
“Take your sons head off”
Now apparently blackmail has been added to the long criminal list of arms trafficking, imprisonment, grievous bodily harm, car theft and burglary. Because four young Chechens between the ages of 21 and 25, who are apparently part of the large group, are said to have scared a father in Vienna via WhatsApp.
They know where he works, where his family lives and where his two children go to school. If he doesn’t pay 5000 euros, then, according to the gloomy message in bad German, they will “take your sons’ heads off”.
The blackmailers were also so cheeky as to pretend to be protectors (“solve the problem”) and to demand money again. While the threatened family was under police protection, the quartet was arrested by the WEGA.
Hannity: Biden administration preaches unity, bipartisanship, acts otherwise
Sean Hannity rips the president and press secretary following slew of executive orders
Rick Perry: Biden’s attack on energy sector decimating American jobs
Former Energy Secretary slams the Biden administrations far-left climate policies on 'Hannity'
PHILIP CARL SALZMAN: I’ve Been ‘Canceled’ Because of My PJ Media Articles
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
An open letter published by the McGill Student Society cited my publications in PJ Media and demanded that McGill University cancel me. More specifically, the society demanded that my status as Emeritus Professor of Anthropology be revoked. This letter was signed by the McGill Student society, anthropology undergraduate and graduate societies, four student Middle Eastern and Islamic groups, and a black student group.
The open letter targeted a more general policy, that of academic freedom. The view expressed in the open letter is that academic freedom should not allow opinions that the signatories disagree with or facts that they might find uncongenial. The signatories believe that they should be the arbiters of what may be thought, said, and written. This is an ambitious role for students to claim, rather akin to a ministry of truth in a closed, Soviet, or Maoist dictatorship.
The open letter takes particular exception to one of my PJ Media articles:
In one recent example [originally published in PJMedia], Salzman goes on to write that “the Middle East is a place where doing harm and being cruel to others is regarded as a virtue and a duty.” …
Framing this as an issue of Professor Salzman’s academic freedom, rather than the right of Muslims and People of Colour have to feel safe, illustrates the ways in which McGill maintains structures that protect and legitimize racist and Islamophobic dialogues. [brackets added]
The Middle East: What You Need to Know
The open letter does not take issue with the truth of the offending statement, or offer argument and evidence attempting to show that it is incorrect, but the letter’s authors limit their efforts to calling me names—“racist” and “Islamophobic”—about an article in which neither race nor Islam were mentioned. In other words, there is no attempt to engage in academic or even common civil discourse to ascertain truth, because truth is not of interest to the students; as far as they are concerned, only their feelings count.
The letter is explicit in saying that the only criterion that should be applied is “the right of Muslims and People of Colour have to feel safe.” Apparently, only opinions that make people feel good about themselves allow them “to feel safe.” This is of course a new definition of what “safety” is: never hearing anything, no matter how true, that you find unpleasant.
Unlike most of these student signatories, including the ones from Middle Eastern and Islamic families, I have spent considerable time living in the Middle East, much of it engaged in ethnographic research in the desert with tribal peoples. My concern about the violence in the Middle East might be taken by fair-minded readers as an admirable, humanitarian concern. It seems likely that many of the McGill student signatories are from families that left the Middle East and brought their children to Canada in order to have a safer and more secure, as well as a freer and more prosperous life. These students do not appear to have learned the lesson of their emigration, or the values of the country to which they immigrated.
Woke Inquisition Strikes Again: Andrew Sullivan Is Out After Attacking the Left’s Stifling Orthodoxy
In the open letter, and in subsequent articles, critics have cited many of my articles, mentioning them by subject or title, denouncing them as expressing unacceptable opinions. But none of the opinions expressed in my articles are explained, none of the arguments presented, and none of the evidence countered. In many cases, the students’ gloss on my articles radically distorts what the articles actually say. It seems uncertain whether the students ever actually read the articles. Certainly, neither the open letter nor subsequent student newspaper articles criticize the articles in any serious substantive fashion. The students apparently hold some woke quasi-religious creed that may not be challenged and regard those who do challenge that creed as heretics who must be canceled. Re-education camps are already working in many institutions, with diversity and inclusion officers policing heretics.
I have already replied to the anthropology students. Anthropology when I entered as a student and then as a professor was an intellectually serious field. Now, having succumbed to grievance narratives, it is little more than a font of woke victimology. Its social analysis is warmed-over Marxist class conflict between identity classes and advocacy for identity politics. Contemporary anthropologists have betrayed anthropology and academic values, which are rarely found in universities today.
Returning to the offending phrase “the Middle East is a place where doing harm and being cruel to others is regarded as a virtue and a duty,” let us consider briefly whether there is any evidence to indicate a prima facie case for its truth. Leave aside the brutal conquests of the Arab Muslim Empire, its invasions and colonies from India to Iberia, its massive enslavement of conquered populations, and the slave-raiding from Africa to Ireland that continued right into the twentieth century. Forget the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians, and the hundred-year Arab terrorist war against the Jews, Saddam’s poison gas attack on his own Kurdish civilians in Halabja, and Sudan’s war against its own “infidel” citizens.
Orwellian Marxists Claim Free Speech Letter Is an Attempt to Silence Minorities
Let’s just stick to recent events. There is the on-and-off war between Turkey, Iraq, and Iran against their Kurdish citizens, the war against Middle Eastern Christians, Baha’i, Yazidi, and other minorities, and, most egregious, the fanatical Islamic State and its maximal brutality, from capturing Yazidi girls and women, gang-raping them, selling them as sex slaves, and then murdering them; to beheading prisoners; to burning alive opposition soldiers. Finally, there is the Syrian war, whether seen as a war of the government against its citizens, or a civil war inspired by Sunni-Shia conflict, in which up to a half-million people—men, women, children, the elderly—died of bullets, bombs, exposure, or starvation.
Perhaps the McGill Middle Eastern and Muslim students do not see any of this as cruelty and harm. Perhaps they are fine with it. Then they should tell us exactly what this is, and how they justify it other than trying to blame someone else.
Like the cruelty and violence in the Middle East, there are many truths that we are no longer allowed to speak about, lest these truths offend someone’s “identity” or contradict the extremist and false views of woke activists. For example, it is forbidden to say that men and women are biologically fundamentally different, and that, other than in imagination, men can never be women and women can never be men. It is forbidden to say what statistics prove absolutely, that African Americans are at great risk, not from police, but from African American criminals. Above all, it is forbidden to state that “systemic racism” does not exist in America, and that statistical disparities among racial census categories are primarily the result of social and cultural conditions and not the result of discrimination. Today, the official institutional culture in the English-speaking world is a set of motivated lies designed to distinguish the elite from the mass of the population and to divide and weaken the people in favor of the elite.
Affirmative Action: The Systemic Racism No One Wants to Talk About
Students, encouraged by their Marxist and neo-Marxist professors, and by university policies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” that privilege students from some minorities, have become America’s and Canada’s Maoist Red Guard, upholding the official lies by attacking fellow students and professors who do not endorse extremist views in order to silence and destroy them. No unwelcome opinions are tolerated, and no discussion of difficult questions allowed. This is no less than the death of the Enlightenment academic tradition and its replacement with far-left Marxist and far-right Islamist propaganda.
Recently many academics have been “canceled,” losing their posts, salaries, and even careers for expressing an opinion or even saying a word that some students and professors found objectionable. In my case, the McGill Red Guard was foiled. Strong support for academic freedom and for myself was provided by the Canadian Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship through letters to the University and to the student signatories, the American National Association of Scholars in an international petition, and the British Free Speech Union in another international petition, as well as letters and articles from a number of colleagues.
In the end, McGill affirmed its commitment to academic freedom, saying that “no single idea, argument, word, or work is ‘prohibited’ at McGill.” Regarding the student demands that my emeritus status be revoked, McGill stated that “Although ‘emeritus’ status may be revoked for misconduct, that term refers to misconduct as defined by the regulations and policies that apply to tenure-track and tenured academic staff. The exercise of academic freedom or freedom of expression, within the boundaries acknowledged by law, is not misconduct under those regulations and policies.” I am an Emeritus Professor still.
I Lived in a Society That Had No Police
The Peculiar Progressive-Islamist Alliance
Anti-Trump Cancel Culture Comes for Franklin Graham
House Democrats ‘Cancel’ Themselves With Gender-Neutral Rules Excluding ‘Mother,’ ‘Father’
_______________________________________________________________
SEE ALSO: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2020/12/04/add-me-to-the-list-of-canceled-professors/