Covid-19

Fox News host Sean Hannity sparked a Twitter firestorm when he attempted to blame President Joe Biden for the latest public health crisis due to the rapidly spreading Delta variant of COVID.

During his segment on Friday, August 6, Hannity appeared to flip the script about all that transpired last year. With a screen prompt that read, "Biden squanders Trump's COVID-19 progress," Hannity accused Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of pushing anti-vaccination conspiracy theories for political gain.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is attempting to shift the blame for his state's alarming uptick in COVID cases but he's already facing pushback against that effort. Over the last week, the Republican governor has taken aim at the (CDC), President Joe Biden, his administration, and even immigrants.

"Joe Biden has the nerve to tell me to get out of the way on COVID while he lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands," DeSantis previously said. "No elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of COVID in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies."

According to a report from the Daily Beast's William Bredderman, the publisher behind the white nationalist VDare organization that maintains a website featuring inflammatory racist attacks on non-whites, was handed a Paycheck Protection Program loan of over $76,0000 -- money that was targetted by the government for struggling businesses crippled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the height of the pandemic that hammered the U.S. economy on Donald Trump's watch, PPP loans were offered to businesses to keep the doors open and their employees working as the economy collapsed.

As Covid-19 cases surge in parts of the country with low vaccination rates, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, stories of unvaccinated Americans expressing deep regrets from their deathbeds are spreading across social media, with healthcare workers facing the excruciating task of telling some patients that it's too late to help them.

On Friday CNN reported the story of Travis Campbell, who has been in a hospital in Virginia for two weeks battling Covid-19—which has caused him to develop pneumonia and left him with a partially collapsed lung—after putting off getting vaccinated not because of stubborn "vaccine hesitancy," but due to a move and knee surgery.

Very few Americans oppose vaccine mandates, or, perhaps more specifically, the vast majority of Americans support vaccine mandates, according to a study that also finds a surprisingly strong number – almost three in 10 – of the unvaccinated support them.

President Joe Biden has already mandated all federal workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus or submit to weekly testing. The U.S. Military is also instituting that policy, which means millions of Americans will be subjected to a vaccinate mandate, even if there is an "opt-out" option.

Greater numbers of American children are being swept up in a wave of coronavirus infections driven by the Delta variant, causing renewed anxiety for parents and a bitter political fight as schools prepare to reopen within weeks.

Much of the surge is concentrated in the southeastern state of Florida, where some school districts are defying an order by the Republican governor forbidding mask mandates, in the latest political twist in the health crisis.

On Friday, writing for the San Antonio Express-News, columnist Elaine Ayala scorched the GOP governors of Texas and Florida for using their states' citizens as guinea pigs for COVID in a political stunt to go after liberals.

"In the two states leading the nationwide surge in coronavirus cases, two Republican governors are trying to outdo one another in rejecting commonsense policies to contain the crisis," wrote Ayala. "It's Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vs. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. "Both face re-election next year, and both are positioning themselves as contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. They've been competing to defy public health recommendations, despite the deadly risk to many of their supporters."

On Friday, taking to Twitter, MSNBC's "All In" anchor Chris Hays tore into Texas Republicans for not even requiring that parents have any right to information about COVID-19 outbreaks happening in their schools that might be infecting their children.

"The Texas GOP position that parents do not have a right to know if there is a covid case in their kid's class is now in competition with DeSantis ban on cruise ships requiring vaccines as the most insane covid policy to date," wrote Hayes. "Also, the politics of this is the least important part of it but if it were liberals making this policy for some kind of lefty reason, it's the kind of thing the right would go absolutely ape-sh*t over."

A Trump-loving right-wing shock jock who described the COVID-19 vaccines as "poison" just over a month ago has now died from COVID-19.

Local news station WPTV reports that South Florida-based radio host Dick Farrel passed away from complications related to COVID-19 this week -- and his friends say he had a change of heart about the vaccine after he got infected.

On Friday, NBC Sports reported that Kirk Cousins, the quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings, has lost a longtime partnership with a local hospital after his public rejection of the COVID-19 vaccine.

"Cousins had served as a spokesman for Holland Hospital in Holland, Michigan, the town where Cousins was a star athlete at Holland Christian High School," reported Michael David Smith. "The hospital announced today that it will cut ties with him."