In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “There’s no reason for you to be walking around with a mask.” But the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) soon changed his stance. Although not 100 percent effective, Fauci said, wearing masks is “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing.”
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Justice Neil Gorsuch called government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic the “greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country” on Thursday.
Gorsuch made his comments in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Thursday dismissal of a case dealing with red states’ attempt to keep in place a Trump administration policy, Title 42, which allowed the U.S. to expel over 2.5 million migrants from the border due to a public health emergency. In an eight-page long statement attached to the decision, Gorsuch slammed an array of emergency power abuses employed by local leaders during the pandemic, from lockdowns to church closures.
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As juvenile crime has skyrocketed across the nation following the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, state lawmakers are looking to pass laws to curb rising youth violence and lawlessness.
Juvenile homicides nationwide increased by 44% from 2019 to 2020 and increased by 83% from 2013 to 2020, according to data from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, as school closures and police reforms have contributed to rising youth crime. Lawmakers in Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and New Jersey have introduced bills to implement measures such as penalty enhancements for juvenile gang members, as well as mandatory holding periods for juveniles charged with violent crimes, to address the rising violence.
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Will the churches be full this Easter?
Or did the COVID-19 pandemic, and the long time of closed churches, usher in a new era?
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Thousands of inmates sent home during the COVID-19 pandemic will be able to complete the rest of their sentences there as long as they remain compliant, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday.
A final DOJ rule released Tuesday clarifies that inmates placed on home confinement under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act will not be automatically sent back to prison when the Biden administration lifts the public health emergency, though the Bureau of Prisons retains discretion to impose sanctions on or return inmates who commit infractions. After multiple extensions, the Biden administration announced in January it would allow the public health emergency to expire on May 11.
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Republican Florida Rep. Brian Mast introduced legislation to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a copy of the bill obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The bill seeks to allow the U.S. government to withhold debt payments to China equal to the cost incurred by the U.S. in response to the pandemic. The bill’s introduction comes days after the Department of Energy (DOE) found that the virus likely originated from a lab leak in China.
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America First Legal (AFL) released a fourth set of documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that reveals more evidence of alleged collusion between the nation’s public health agency and social media companies to censor free speech and silence Americans under the government’s label of “misinformation.”
Last week, AFL’s 600-page document release uncovered evidence that Twitter operated a “Partner Support Portal” for government employees and other selective “stakeholders” that would allow them to delete or flag posts viewed as “misinformation,” noted AFL, which is led by former President Donald Trump’s immigration advisor Stephen Miller.
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School districts that stayed remote as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic saw larger drops in their enrollment compared to in-person school districts, according to a Monday report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
During the 2021-2022 school year, remote learning school districts lost at least half a million more students than school districts that returned to in-person learning, according to a report by AEI. Remote school districts’ enrollment dropped 1.3% more than school districts that were in-person 90% of the year.
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National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci and his wife saw a net worth increase of $5 million during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by a government watchdog group.
Between Jan. 1, 2019 and Dec. 31, 2021, the Faucis expanded their net worth from $7.6 million to more than $12.6 million, according to OpenTheBooks’ Wednesday analysis of the 81-year-old retiring NIAID director’s financial disclosures. The director was the highest paid federal employee in both 2021 and 2022, earning $456,000 per year and $480,000 per year, respectively, the analysis noted.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sent over $1.1 billion in child tax credit payments to incorrect recipients during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an audit by the Department of the Treasury’s Inspector General (IG) for Tax Administration on Tuesday.
The IRS sent the payments to 1.5 million people between July and November of 2021 during the pandemic, according to the audit’s report. Additionally, the IG noted that 4.1 million taxpayers did not receive payments they should have, amounting to $3.7 billion withheld.
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Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced a resolution Thursday to end the COVID-19 national emergency declaration that is still in effect under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) despite Joe Biden’s comments that the pandemic is “over” in the United States.
“Since President Biden used his appearance on 60 Minutes to declare COVID is over, he must immediately terminate the COVID-19 national emergency declaration and wind down other emergency authorities that his Administration continues to force us to live under,” Marshall said in a statement released by his office.
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Public health agencies are facing perhaps the most serious threats to their control over information since the COVID-19 pandemic started, playing defense in lawsuits that have already exposed substantial federal involvement in censorship and could next uncloak alleged manipulation of data that has driven COVID policy from the start.
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The federal government has awarded a controversial nonprofit a $1 million grant for research to help prevent future viral pandemics, an award that comes after more than two years of suspicions that the nonprofit in question may have been bankrolling certain types of highly dangerous coronavirus experiments in the city where the COVID-19 pandemic began.
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A majority of Latinos agree with Title 42, a Trump-era policy used to quickly expel migrants due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a poll released Thursday by Axios-Ipsos Latino in partnership with Noticias Telemundo.
Of the Latinos polled, 51% strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with Title 42 remaining, while 44% are opposed to keeping it, according to Axios.
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One legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic could be the devastation it brought to the American worker by disconnecting millions from the workforce.
New research estimates that 3 million workers plan to remain permanently sidelined over concerns of physical illness or physical impairment due to COVID-19.
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The U.S. birthrate in 2021 increased for the first time since 2014, with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions potentially causing the jump.
The U.S. birthrate saw a 1% increase over the course of 2021 with 3.66 million babies being born throughout the year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics. All age groups of women over 25 contributed to the jump in birthrates, with some experts suggesting that a lengthening COVID-19 pandemic might have contributed to the bump, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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With one exception, every gold standard study of masks in community settings has failed to find that they slow the spread of contagious respiratory diseases. The outlier is a widely cited study run in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 pandemic, and some of its authors claim it proves that mask mandates “or strategies like handing out masks at churches and other public events—could save thousands of lives each day globally and hundreds each day in the United States.”
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President Joe Biden is expected to pause student loan payments through Aug. 31, once again extending the moratorium that has allowed Americans to postpone paying their debts throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, The Hill first reported.
The Biden administration is expected to announce Wednesday another pause on federal student loan payments which will impact roughly 43 million Americans who owe a combined $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, The Hill reported, citing multiple sources. The initial moratorium was scheduled to expire on May 1.
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A new national report highlights the “compounding effect” the pandemic and remote learning have had on student performance, especially for the youngest learners.
The report from Renaissance Learning Inc., a Minnesota-based education technology company, found students have made modest gains since returning to the classroom, but have yet to catch up all the way.
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