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Hugs with friends. Birthday parties indoors. Pillow fights. School children who got their first COVID-19 shots Wednesday said these are the pleasures they look forward to as the U.S. enters a major new phase in fighting the pandemic. Health officials hailed shots for kids aged 5 to 11 as a major breakthrough after more than 18 months of illness, hospitalizations, deaths and disrupted education. Kid-sized doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine cleared two final hurdles Tuesday — a recommendation from CDC advisers, followed by a green light from Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At...

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head and chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that fully vaccinated Americans could enjoy Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings with family. Anchor Martha Raddatz said, “Dr. Fauci, we know the best way to keep safe is to be vaccinated. But what are your guidelines for the upcoming holidays? Will you be giving out Halloween candy? What do we do with Thanksgiving and Christmas and other holidays?” Fauci said, “I believe strongly that particularly in the vaccinated people if you are vaccinated, and your family members...

Data from the United Kingdom indicates that while those that have been fully vaccinated have been less likely to catch COVID they are more likely to die of it. Since February of this year there have been 47,008 cases of COVID among the fully-vaccinated and 151,054 cases among the unvaccinated. Of the fully-vaccinated cases, 402 have died (0.86%). Of the unvaccinated cases 253 have died (0.17%). The vaccinated are five times more likely to die of COVID if they catch the disease than the unvaccinated are. These statistics would seem to cast doubt on the assertion that public health requires...

A groundbreaking preprint paper by the prestigious Oxford University Clinical Research Group, published Aug. 10 in The Lancet, includes alarming findings devastating to the COVID vaccine rollout. The study found vaccinated individuals carry 251 times the load of COVID-19 viruses in their nostrils compared to the unvaccinated. While moderating the symptoms of infection, the jab allows vaccinated individuals to carry unusually high viral loads without becoming ill at first, potentially transforming them into presymptomatic superspreaders. This phenomenon may be the source of the shocking post-vaccination surges in heavily vaccinated populations globally. The paper’s authors, Chau et al, demonstrated widespread vaccine...

The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700. Find yourself in a motorcycle accident suffering the inconvenience of losing your cerebellum and all that other gooey stuff spread like jam over the interstate? Don’t worry. The medics will find an intact nostril and will determine that you tested ‘positive for COVID’. What remains of you...

Dozens of fully vaccinated people in New Jersey have died of the Chinese coronavirus, according to the state’s Department of Health. Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced Monday that vaccines in New Jersey were proving to be 99.9 percent effective in the Garden State, reporting 84 breakthrough hospitalizations and 31 deaths among the vaccinated. But this week, a state health official confirmed that 49 people who were fully vaccinated have died of the virus as of July 12. More than half of those had underlying health conditions, Donna Leusner, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health, told NJ.com. It remains...

Democrats will no longer release a daily count of the number of coronavirus cases among the Democrat Texas state lawmakers who last week shirked their legislative duties and fled to Washington, DC, to avoid acting on voting laws, a spokeswoman for the Texas House Democrats said Monday. The delegation will no longer offer daily transparency in regard to the number of Texas House Democrats who have tested positive for the Chinese coronavirus, according to Texas House Democrats spokeswoman Cara Santucci.

Both aides had been fully vaccinated, and Pelosi's staff member had been in contact with the Texas lawmakers, her spokesman said.

Three of the Texas Democrats who flew to Washington this week to stymie efforts to pass election reform legislation have tested positive for COVID-19. One member tested positive on Friday night and immediately informed colleagues, the Texas House Democrat Caucus said in a statement to news outlets. Caucus members and staff took rapid tests, which all came back negative, but two more members tested positive on Saturday morning. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. All three members are fully vaccinated against the virus, the caucus said. Fully vaccinated refers to people who have received...

Three Texas Democrats who fled the Lone Star state in a private jet in order to block election integrity bills have now tested positive for COVID- 19. The news was confirmed by the Texas House Democratic Caucus leadership on Saturday - five days after the left-wing lawmakers packed onto the private aircraft without face masks as they snapped selfies intended to taunt their political rivals. Since that time, the Texas Democrats have been staying at a plush hotel in Washington, DC and have been out and about in the community. The group even met with Vice President Kamala Harris during...

WASHINGTON — Three Texas House Democrats have tested positive for COVID-19 from Washington, D.C., according to Texas House Democratic Caucus leadership. They're among nearly 60 lawmakers who fled the state Monday to break quorum in the House, part of an effort to block the passage of a GOP-led elections bill. Most members are staying in the same hotel. One member found out about their positive test result late Friday evening, but they do not have symptoms, caucus officials said. All House lawmakers were alerted and received a rapid test immediately following the member's positive result. Two additional members tested positive...

The Biden administration for the first time on Tuesday allowed news media inside a Customs and Border Protection facility facing unprecedented overcrowding due to the recent surge of migrant children and families. The photos revealed a severely overcrowded tent structure with more than 4,000 people, including children and families, were crammed into a space intended for 250, and the youngest were kept in a large playpen with mats on the floor for sleeping. Representatives from the press were allowed inside a temporary tent facility in Donna, Texas, which was meant to hold 250 migrants but had a population of more...

ction class="post-body"> When Joe Biden signaled his open borders plan, it triggered human traffickers south of the border to start teeing up swarms of people to storm the U.S. border and flood the already COVID pandemic-slammed U.S. labor market. But now we learn that the Biden administration has not been COVID testing the illegal immigrants swarming the border before they’re released into the interior of the US.Joe Biden knew this before he opened the borders, gobsmackingly asserted that the US “didn’t have a COVID vaccine,” and claimed the pandemic was so severe he had to spend nearly $2 trillion to...

A Biogen medical conference in late February led to between 205,000 to 300,000 COVID-19 infections from February to November of this year, according to a study in the peer-reviewed journal Science by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.... ...In the four counties that comprise the Boston region, 51,000 - about half - of the cases of COVID-19 until the beginning of November had genetic markers that linked the cases to the conference, according to the report. The virus also spread from the conference to other states at the beginning of...

JERUSALEM—Authorities are investigating after witnesses accused a local religious nut named Simon Peter and several others of hosting an unauthorized super spreader event in an enclosed room in Jerusalem. Experts say the event, which was not authorized by the local Jewish or Roman authorities, may put everyone in the area at risk for infectious diseases such as leprosy. "This is completely inexcusable," said local magistrate Biggus Tookus. "We have found that there were at least 11 people at this event. No one's address was recorded at the door and we don't know where they are now." One medical expert named...

The Los Angeles Dodgers are World Series champions after defeating the Tampa Bay Rays 3-1 on Tuesday night. With the victory, LA secured its first title since 1988. Immediately after Game 6, Dodgers fans took to the streets of Los Angeles to celebrate the occasion. The scenes from the festivities were absolutely wild.

News came out today that White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany tested positive for the Wuhan coronavirus. Jim Acosta tried to blame her for not wearing a mask at a briefing yesterday when she was outdoors and socially distanced from anyone. She was not wearing a mask during a gaggle with reporters yesterday. https://t.co/ckuQzrq66q pic.twitter.com/fqNj7Xnaop — Jim Acosta (@Acosta) October 5, 2020 As my colleague Sister Toldjah wrote earlier, you had crazy tweets from reporters such as the one from CBS correspondent Ben Tracy. I felt safer reporting in North Korea than I currently do reporting at The White House....

As states across America being to reopen, some scientists are voicing fears about so-called "superspreaders" who may be responsible for larger numbers of coronavirus cases through airborne transmission. Although many businesses are reopening with stringent social distancing guidelines, those practices vary significantly from state to state and even from city to city within various states. Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist at University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wrote in a recent perspective paper in Science that a review of existing literature provides evidence that the new coronavirus can linger in the air, perhaps even for hours, before...

The thing about R0 values is that they are averages. And to explain why that makes a difference, we need to talk about Coronaviruses. Before 2019-nCoV, the most notorious Coronaviruses were MERS and SARS. MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, has had several small outbreaks since it was first discovered in 2012, and while very severe in terms of mortality (the case fatality rate is around 30 to 40 percent), the virus’s R0 is very low. And then there’s SARS. Because while SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, caused a huge uproar in its heyday of 2002-3, good old fashioned...

<p>Atlanta, May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Five particularly infectious patients may have triggered the Singapore outbreak of severe acute respiratory disease that health officials have just brought under control, according to a study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</p>