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It was four years ago, in March 2020, that health officials declared COVID-19 a pandemic and America began shutting down schools, closing small businesses, restricting gatherings and travel, and other lockdown measures to “slow the spread” of the virus. To mark that grim anniversary, a group of medical and policy experts released a report, called “COVID Lessons Learned,” which assesses the government’s response to the pandemic. According to the report, that response included a few notable successes, along with a litany of failures that have taken a severe toll on the population. During the pandemic, many governments across the globe...

he nation's top public health agency is expanding a program that tests international travelers for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention program asks arriving international passengers to volunteer to have their noses swabbed and answer questions about their travel. The program operates at six airports and on Tuesday, the CDC said it was adding two more — Chicago's O'Hare and Miami. Those locations should provide more information about respiratory infections coming out of South America, Africa and Asia, particularly, CDC officials said. "Miami and Chicago enable us to collect samples coming from areas of...

SEATTLE (KOMO) — The leader of a fraud ring that stole more than $6.8 million in pandemic benefits from nearly every major COVID-19 pandemic assistance program was sentenced to prison. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), 29-year-old Paradise Williams personally received more than $2 million in fraudulent proceeds and spent the money on luxury cars, lavish trips, cosmetic surgery, jewelry and designer goods. The DOJ said Williams was sentenced to five years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering. “Paradise Williams was relentless in her efforts to steal pandemic benefits throughout the entire duration of our national emergency,...

Public health advocates are watching in growing alarm as former President Trump increasingly embraces the anti-vaccine movement. “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate,” Trump said in a recent campaign rally in Richmond, Va. It’s a line Trump has repeated, and his campaign said he is only referring to school COVID-19 vaccine mandates — but that hasn’t eased fears that the GOP leader could accelerate already worrying trends of declining child vaccination. Trump “is an important voice. He has a big platform. And he uses that platform, in this...

A corporate media journalist, who controversially demanded that unvaccinated members of the public be taken away to concentration camps, has died at just 33 years old.Ian Vandaelle died after being hospitalized and “declared neurologically dead,” his family revealed.Vandaelle was a Canadian business journalist who worked as a reporter and editor at the Financial Post.He was also previously a producer at BNN Bloomberg for over a decade.However, he was known to many on social media for his pro-Covid vaccine posts on Twitter, now known as X.Vandaelle advocated for vaccine passports and mandates and called for the firing of anyone who refused...

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that just 20% of Americans view the coronavirus as a major threat to the health of the U.S. population today and only 10% are very concerned they will get it and require hospitalization. This data represents a low ebb of public concern about the virus that reached its height in the summer and fall of 2020, when as many as two-thirds of Americans viewed COVID-19 as a major threat to public health.Just 28% of U.S. adults say they have received the updated COVID-19 vaccine, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) quietly updated its federal COVID-19 guidelines to recommend treating the virus similarly to the flu, vindicating years of dissident opinion and undermining the original justification for drastically upending Americans’ lives in its name. Declaring that COVID is “no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses,” the new guidance says COVID’s threat is now “more similar to that of other common respiratory viruses,” justifying the agency’s decision to issue a general “Respiratory Virus Guidance, rather than additional virus-specific guidance.” It...

CHICAGO -- People age 65 and older should get an additional dose of the current COVID-19 vaccine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends. The agency's independent vaccine advisers voted Wednesday to recommend the additional shot, and CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen endorsed the recommendation, CNN reported. The vaccine is recommended for everyone ages 6 months and older, but data from the CDC shows that people haven't been getting the shots.

Ending pandemics is a social decision, not scientific. Governments and organizations rely on social, cultural and political considerations to decide when to officially declare the end of a pandemic. Ideally, leaders try to minimize the social, economic and public health burden of removing emergency restrictions while maximizing potential benefits.Vaccine policy is a particularly complicated part of pandemic decision-making, involving a variety of other complex and often contradicting interests and considerations. Although COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives in the U.S., vaccine policymaking throughout the pandemic was often reactive and politicized.A late November 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that...

The 49-year-old collapsed on Wednesday morning in Auckland after running in the ChildFund Water Run, a fundraiser for Pacific communities. He received medical treatment on the scene at Auckland's Britomart, according to TVNZ, with screens erected to shield him from public view. The Greens confirmed the news 'with profound shock and sadness' at 10.45am. 'We are absolutely devastated. A beautiful family has lost a dedicated father, husband, and community leader,' co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson said in a statement

The Empire State is not expected to recover all the jobs lost from the COVID pandemic until at least late 2026, according to a new analysis. The report by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, which cited a forecast by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office, expressed concern about New York’s slow jobs recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the rest of the country. “State employment growth is still forecasted to lag that of the nation,” DiNapoli’s analysis of Hochul’s executive budget plan said. “While the nation’s employment exceeds its pre-pandemic levels, New York has still not recovered all the jobs that were...

Viral headlines exaggerated and inaccurately described a recent study about a coronavirus in mice.It’s been four years since the COVID-19 virus first began to spread. The U.S. National Intelligence Council assessed that two theories on the virus’s origins are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal or a laboratory-associated incident. Recent alarming headlines of Chinese experiments involving the virus reignited pandemic-era fears online. VERIFY reader Karen asked us on Facebook if a story from the Staten Island Advance, a newspaper local to New York City’s Staten Island, titled “Chinese scientists create COVID-19 strain that is 100% lethal to ‘humanized’ mice,...

A New York state Supreme Court Justice called out Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for coming down harder against two residents who bought fake COVID-19 vaccine cards than he does for those charged with much more serious crimes. In a recent ruling, state Supreme Court Justice Brendan T. Lantry dismissed Bragg’s felony charges against the two, identified by their initials in the case, who tried to flout NYC’s vaccine mandate. J.O., a nursing student, and R.V., an employee with the city Department of Environmental Protection, were among hundreds accused of buying fake vaccination cards from a New Jersey stripper, Jasmine...

The technology used in Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine carries toxicity risks, scientists with the company said in a new paper.“A major challenge now is how to efficiently de-risk potential toxicities associated with mRNA technology,” the scientists wrote in the paper, which was published by Nature Reviews Drug Discovery on Jan. 23.The Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 shots use modified messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology. The mRNA is delivered by lipid nanoparticles (LNP).The toxicity risks include “lipid nanoparticle structural components, production methods, route of administration and proteins produced from complexed mRNAs,” the authors of the paper said.Authors of the paper include Eric Jacquinet...

Calling for governments to enact a "global moratorium" on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could have been a death sentence for a scientist's career not long ago. Now it opens the door to a prestigious science publisher. The Springer Nature medical journal Cureus, sibling to Nature and Scientific American, published a peer-reviewed paper by high-profile mRNA vaccine critics last month, showing the growing mainstream openness to data and arguments once nitpicked if not ignored by publishers and suppressed by academia and Big Tech. The feds have struggled to keep interest high in each new formulation of the COVID vaccines, with fewer than...

A new report is highlighting how federal COVID funds were used in Washington state to give $1,000 checks to illegal immigrants who were ineligible to receive federal economic impact payments during the pandemic due to their immigration status. The report, by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), points to money administered by the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF), which was created by the American Rescue Plan Act and was intended to help state and local governments with their response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Washington state received $4.4 billion in funding overall from that program. The...

On Friday, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) said that the fact that they cut taxes and “kept things open during COVID” has helped the state grow its population and the state has managed to balance its budget because it has attracted more people to the state. On CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Lamont stated, “We inherited a $2 billion deficit. The first thing thing I wanted to do five years ago was make sure we didn’t raise taxes. That’s what the five previous governors had done. Now, it’s five years later, we’ve got our budget balanced. We’re making investments. And we’re able...

A new report is highlighting how federal COVID funds were used in Washington state to give $1,000 checks to illegal immigrants who were ineligible to receive federal economic impact payments during the pandemic due to their immigration status. The report, by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), points to money administered by the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF), which was created by the American Rescue Plan Act and was intended to help state and local governments with their response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Washington state received $4.4 billion in funding overall from that program. The...

JN. 1, a highly contagious off-shoot of the Omicron strain, now makes up around 86 percent of COVID cases in the United States after accounting for less than 5 percent of infections nationally in early November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports. It's also the most dominant across the globe. JN.1 cases in the US have doubled over the last month. In late December, it caused 44 percent of cases in the US, after making up around 22 percent of infections in the middle of December. That's around the time the World Health Organization (WHO) declared JN.1...

The Biden Administration has reportedly stonewalled the investigation into the COVID-19 pandemic, causing Republicans to schedule a hearing on the matter. This week, GOP Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, accused President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) of tampering with an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Wenstrup said that the HHS had spent the past year “intentionally” avoiding lawful Congressional oversight requests for documents. He said they deliberately ignored several letters, providing many excuses. “When we asked for important testimony, HHS seemed to purposefully mislead Select Subcommittee...