Covid-19

As a highly contagious respiratory disease, COVID-19 spreads quickly where groups congregate unmasked, speak loudly and remain unprotected, which makes church worship among the best places for the virus to spread.

During the 2020 COVID lockdowns, slightly fewer than six in 10 people who regularly attended church told a Pew Survey that they were still attending in person. Now that lockdowns have ceased and church services are meeting in person again, COVID is spreading through congregations, particularly those that refuse to take precautions.

The Leon County School Board is gearing up for a fight against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). Thursday morning's school board meeting ruled 5-0 to approve a $50,000 expenditure for an outside counsel to be hired to handle the ban on mask mandates, said Tallahassee Reports.

Leon County, which includes the capital city of Tallahassee, is one of nearly a dozen counties that has bucked the DeSantis executive order mandating schools from requiring masks in classes. Florida is the worst state in the U.S. for COVID-19 and the contrast to 2020 numbers is dramatic.

A Florida father apologized on Thursday after he forced a Sarasota elementary school into lockdown by threatening an assistant principal.

The Associated Press reported that parent Christopher Kivlin "threatened to leave his job and confront" the assistant principal because he was told that his children could not come to school without face masks.

The anti-vaxx movement continues to co-opt language used by liberals, declaring "my body, my choice" – not when it comes to abortion but to vaccines.

Now they're taking that one step further, imposing victimization status on those who refuse to get vaccinated against the deadly coronavirus that has killed at least 650,000 Americans and is transmissible by just breathing.

On Thursday, The Daily Beast reported that a private COVID-19 testing facility turned away an appointment by right-wing activist Candace Owens, saying they couldn't in good conscience help someone who has been spreading disinformation that made the pandemic worse.

"We cannot support anyone who has pro-actively worked to make this pandemic worse by spreading misinformation, politicizing and DISCOURAGING the wearing of masks and actively dissuading people from receiving life-saving vaccinations," wrote the facility's owner, Suzanna Lee. "My team and myself have worked overtime, to exhaustion, unpaid and underpaid this past year, spending our own capital to ensure that our community remains protected. It would be unfair to them and to the sacrifices we have all made this year to serve you."

A Fox Business segment on Thursday slammed podcaster Joe Rogan after he took a horse dewormer called ivermectin to treat his Covid-19 infection.

The use of the drug to treat Covid-19 was initially pushed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other right-wing media.

America's spies still don't know where covid came from. In May, President Joe Biden called for a three-month sprint to discover the origins of Covid-19, but according to a recently-released report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the body that oversees the 18 agencies that comprise the US Intelligence Community (IC), little progress has been made toward that goal. This shouldn't surprise anyone. It was sheer hubris to expect the IC to crack one of the major scientific mysteries of our time over the summer.

It's fair to ask why the president gave this mission to the IC in the first place. We normally look to epidemiologists and virologists to explain the origins of viruses, not spies. And the unclassified summary of the report implies that the spooks are leaning heavily on the same body of scientific literature as everyone else.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Wednesday reported on the higher death toll in the most Republican counties vs the most Democratic ones.

Hayes pointed to a new report that was published by data journalist Christopher Ingraham under the headline, "GOP COVID policy is killing GOP voters.

On Wednesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that a boy in Georgia abruptly died from COVID — even though his case did not appear to be life-threatening in any way.

According to AJC, 13-year-old Porter Helms tested positive for COVID-19 last month and started quarantining at home.

Public health scientist Eric Feigl-Ding on Wednesday shamed podcast host Joe Rogan for continuing to push his fans to treat COVID-19 with ivermectin even as he's said in the past that many of them don't need to get vaccinated.

Feigl-Ding, who is currently a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, used Rogan's recently revealed COVID-19 diagnosis to review some of his past statements about the virus.