Asean crosses 4 million Covid-19 cases but Singapore to soon start easing lockdown measures
The number of Covid-19 cases across Southeast Asia crossed 4.02 million, with 25,642 people testing positive on Monday.
The number was slightly higher than Sunday’s 25,603.
With 374 deaths, down from Sunday’s 390, total fatalities in Asean rose to 78,888.
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Monday said they expected to secure total control over the pandemic in the next two weeks and start easing lockdown measures in the country.
From June 13 onwards, Singapore will start vaccinating students aged over 12 years, after public health officers warned that new strains of the virus could increase the infection rate among children and adolescents.
Malaysia’s public health minister said that so far 82,341 cases had been found among children and teenagers. Of these, 19,851 patients were under four years old while 27,402 patients were between 13 to 17 years old. No underage patients have developed severe symptoms that require treatment in ICU. The ministry urged parents to take extra care of their children to keep them safe from the virus, such as refraining from taking them to crowded areas.
China three-child policy and the new age of demographic anxiety
On Monday, China announced what seemed to many analysts as an inevitability – a further unwinding of its once-draconian regime of population control.
According to a new policy unveiled at a meeting of the Politburo chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping, married couples are now allowed to have up to three children. The move comes on the heels of China’s once-in-a-decade census, which found that the country’s population grew at its slowest rate since the 1950s.
The narrative of China’s success often hinges on its particular 20th-century demographic advantage: The country’s Communist rulers were able to mobilize a huge pool of impoverished workers to fuel an unprecedented transformation that made the world’s most populous nation into a global manufacturing powerhouse. But after years of rapid industrialization and urbanization, China is experiencing a demographic slump on par with countries in the developed world, with declining birthrates, an aging population and a growing gender gap.
China’s birthrate dropped 15 percent last year – a reflection of the intense toll of the pandemic, but also broader trends of rising costs of housing and education in China’s teeming cities. Nearly 20 percent of the Chinese population is now aged 60 or above, according to the latest census data. By the start of the next decade, according to research by Morgan Stanley, close to 124 million more people will have entered the age category of 55 and above, the largest demographic increase among age categories and a sign of a rapidly graying population.
This is all largely thanks to the legacy of Beijing’s heavy-handed “one-child” policy, which was brought into effect four decades ago to tamp down a surging population. For years, authorities implemented the policy unevenly and often brutally, with millions of forced abortions and sterilizations likely carried out. In 2016, in a tacit recognition of the damage done, China relaxed its protocols to allow married couples to have two children. But the country’s birthrate still dropped the next four consecutive years.
The latest edict smacks of a mounting sense of panic within the halls of power. “As new data exposed the vulnerabilities in China’s growth model, calls among the public – from demographers to central bank officials and entrepreneurs – for scrapping restrictions on family size have gained urgency,” wrote my colleague Lily Kuo. “Yet China’s leaders stopped short of completely dropping the deeply unpopular family-planning regime in place since 1980 – often brutally enforced, through forced abortions, sterilizations and steep fines. Keeping the limits in place, researchers say, is a way to maintain control.”
That control took various forms in the preceding decades. Human rights activists and journalists documented myriad cases of forced sterilizations, as well as an opaque and often cruel system of punishments and fines for those found to be violating the one-child rule.
“Local officials had wide discretion in determining how much to fine violators. Sums could range from a multiple of two to 10 times annual household income,” wrote Mei Fong in “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment.” “People had no way of figuring out ahead of time what they were liable for, and two sets of violators, under similar circumstances, might pay vastly different penalties. In 2010, a family-planning official apparently imposed a fine of 5 million yuan, or over $800,000, on a violator.”
“What can be said is that China’s policy produced a lot of one-child families – today the country has about 150 million of them – and perhaps tens of millions of abortions and sterilizations, many of them involuntary,” noted the Economist in 2019. “Corrupt and brutal family-planning officials demolished the homes of some who resisted. Women had their menstrual cycles recorded on blackboards, for all to see. As birth quotas bit, gender ratios became more skewed by infanticide and sex-selective abortions of girls.”
Few experts believe the new rules will be able to redress the harm inflicted over multiple generations. “The three-child policy is a step forward, but the question is: If the two-child policy did not mean people had more children, will that happen under a three-child policy?” Sun Xiaomei, a professor at China Women’s University, told Kuo.
“A comprehensive policy package ranging from tax incentives, education and housing subsidies, more generous maternity leave, universal provision of child care” is needed for the three-child policy to be effective, Liu Li-Gang, managing director and chief China economist at Citigroup, told Bloomberg News.
China’s Politburo indicated it will prioritize addressing some of these mounting social needs, though it offered few specifics on its plans. As Kuo reported, myriad commenters on Chinese social media speculated over the shift in official policy and whether the central government would move toward punishing those not procreating. One Weibo user wrote on the microblog site, “Whether you change the policy to five children or eight children, housing prices are still the best sterilization tool.”
China’s demographic turn is perhaps the most acute illustration of a global trend. The world’s population surged in the 20th century, growing from 1.6 billion in 1900 to around 6 billion in 2000. Now, forecasters predict that the majority of the world’s countries with the exception of some nations in sub-Saharan Africa will see a population decline by the end of the century. The United States, like China, also experienced its slowest population growth in almost a century over the last decade. According to research published last year in the Lancet, a British medical journal, 23 nations, including Japan and Italy, will have their populations halved by 2100.
This has radical implications for the future of global politics. “The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized – around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old,” noted the New York Times in May.
“It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older,” the Times wrote. “Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.”
Police searching for gunmen in Miami area shooting that left at least 2 dead, 21 injured
Authorities are searching for the gunmen who opened fire shortly after midnight on Sunday outside of a music event in the Miami area, leaving two dead and more than 20 injured in what police are calling a targeted act that resulted from group rivalries.
Three men approached the El Mula Banquet Hall near Hialeah in a white Nissan Pathfinder, police said. They got out of the vehicle armed with assault rifles and handguns and opened fire on the crowd that had gathered outside the space, before getting back in the car and fleeing, police said. Twenty-three people were shot, and two were declared dead on the scene.
Three people were still hospitalized Monday with critical injuries and “clinging to life,” Miami-Dade police Maj. Jorge Aguiar said during a Monday news conference. Three others who were hospitalized have been released, including a 17-year-old who was shot in the leg.
Authorities are searching for the vehicle and the gunmen, and seeking information from the public, officials said in a Monday news conference. Police also released surveillance footage they said they hope will spur more information from the public.
“This is a day that we should be with our loved ones, we should be remembering those who were lost who served our country” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said during the Memorial Day update. “Instead, here we are standing once again for a terrible tragedy.”
Aguiar said the violence stemmed from “an ongoing rivalry” between two groups, and police believe the intended target may have been in front of the venue.
When the gunmen started shooting, several people in the parking lot returned fire, police said.
During the news conference, a man authorities later identified as a father of one of the victims interrupted the briefing, turning to the cameras to say, “You all killed my kid,” before officials pulled him away.
“That is the pain that affects our community, right there, right before you,” said Alfredo “Freddy” Ramirez III, director of the Miami-Dade Police Department.
Police have not officially released the names of any of the victims.
Angelic Green told the Miami Herald that her son and nephew, both 24, were among those shot early Sunday.
She said her son was shot in the abdomen and underwent surgery, and is in stable condition. Her nephew was shot one time in the abdomen and three times in the leg, but also seems to be stable.
Green said her son called her and her husband “frantic” to tell them he had been shot. “He was telling us, if something happens to him, that he loves us. We said, ‘We love you, too, but you’re gonna survive this.'”
Green called it the “worst phone call of my life.”
The Miami-Dade police department released video footage that shows three people leaving a Pathfinder wearing hoods and masks. They run off screen and leave the car doors ajar. Less than 10 seconds later, the individuals run back to the car and drive off.
Levine Cava made an emphatic call for the community’s cooperation to “get these killers off the streets,” asking residents to come forward. “We need your help. We need information.”
A litany of law enforcement and county officials condemned the gun violence that shook the area in recent days.
On Friday night, seven people were shot and one person died after a gunman opened fire near the Wynwood area. Police said they don’t believe the two shootings are connected.
“We must break the cycle of violence – there is a cycle,” Levine Cava said during the news conference. “Gun violence is an epidemic, and the pandemic has intensified it.”
Miami-Dade county commissioner Keon Hardemon called the recent gun violence “acts of domestic terrorism.”
“Anytime a shooter strikes 20 people, most of whom have nothing to do with whatever their issue is – anytime they strike them down and they die in our community, it is meant to keep us from having a regular life here in Miami-Dade County,” he said. “It is to keep us from going out and enjoying ourselves.”
“It is to put a chill in our communities,” Hardemon said.
Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo also decried gun violence over the weekend.
“Mass shootings continue to occur on a regular basis across our country & yet elected officials only talk about the militarization of the police on the left and gun rights on the right. Gun violence is a public health epidemic our Nation needs to address,” he wrote on Twitter.
Marcus Lemonis, of the CNBC show “The Profit,” is offering a $100,000 reward to help authorities find the attackers in Sunday’s incident. Miami-Dade police tweeted that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ Miami Division added $25,000 to the reward.
Published : June 01, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Paulina Firozi, Paulina Villegas
With over 25,000 new Covid-19 cases, Asean crosses 4 million mark
The number of Covid-19 cases crossed 4 million across Southeast Asia with 25,603 new cases reported on Sunday, lower than Saturday’s 28,716.
The number of deaths also was lower at 390, down from Saturday’s 457. Total Covid-19-related deaths in Asean rose to 78,515.
Singapore reported 25 new cases on Sunday, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 62,028, 32 have died and 61,423 people have been cured and discharged. Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is preparing to announce plans to control the outbreak and the reopening of the country.
Cambodia reported 579 new cases and six deaths on Sunday, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 29,404 with 209 deaths, while 20,900 people have been cured and discharged. Kampot province has ordered all casinos and markets near borders with other provinces to shut down for 14 days to control the spread of the infection.
This concert ticket costs $18 – or $1,000 if youre not vaccinated
This spring, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order forbidding businesses from making their patrons prove that they have been vaccinated against the coronavirus. He also signed into law a bill to give the ban more teeth, threatening violators with fines in the thousands of dollars.
One Florida concert promoter thinks he has a workaround: offer $18 tickets to anyone who is vaccinated and charge $999.99 for everyone else.
“I’m not denying entry to anyone,” said Paul Williams. “I’m just offering a discount.”
The governor’s office says the unorthodox pricing violates Florida’s rules: “Charging higher ticket prices for individuals who do not furnish proof of vaccination unfairly discriminates against people who have enumerated rights under Florida law,” said Christina Pushaw, press secretary for the Republican governor’s office, in an email to The Washington Post.
Williams said he figured his tactics were safe – the executive order carries limited penalties, and the new law does not go into effect until shortly after his small punk rock event planned for June 26 in St. Petersburg. But he said he was unprepared for the vitriol that followed: The anti-vaccination Facebook messages, the sudden spam calls, the misspelled email that warned the band their next show could be their “last” and said: “You’re fans are going to kill you.”
“I didn’t know that caring about my community would make me Hitler,” he said in an interview Saturday, declining to give his age out of concern for his privacy. He said he and the band are flagging the threatening email to law enforcement.
The backlash around a modest event for a couple hundred people underscores the deep divisions over what the United States’ return to normal should look like amid lingering resistance to vaccination. As the rate of shots slow, public health officials have warned that the country may not reach the oft-repeated goal of “herd immunity” against a virus that has killed nearly 600,000 people in the United States and slowed the economy. But some states including Florida have sought to limit businesses’ ability to check vaccinations after a year of coronavirus restrictions becoming politicized.
Asked Saturday whether he regrets the pricing move – which brought national news coverage – Williams said: “We’re still sticking to our guns.”
A few of the “discount” tickets were left as of Saturday afternoon, he said; headliner Teenage Bottlerocket’s website listed the St. Petersburg show as having sold out. None of the “standard” price tickets had sold.
Williams said attendees must present photo ID and a coronavirus vaccination card the day of the concert to enter at the lower price, which was reported by Creative Loafing: Tampa Bay.
Miguel Chen, the bassist for Teenage Bottlerocket, said in an interview that his group was eager to get back out after canceling international tour plans during the pandemic – a devastating time for many in the music scene. Chen said the band’s most recent show was in March 2020.
“It’s obvious that covid and music are going to kind of have to coexist for a while,” he said. “So we had this idea of … let’s contact these promoters and kind of spitball and come up with creative ways to do safe shows.”
Some events are moving outdoors. Others are limiting capacities. Then there was Williams’s idea.
“When we first heard it, we thought it was a joke,” Chen said. But band members had gotten their shots as soon as possible, he said, eager to protect their families and resume playing. They agreed that if Williams thought this was “the best way to safely throw a party in his town, then we back him and we support it,” Chen recalled.
Hailing from Texas – another Republican-led state where covid-19 restrictions have drawn pushback – Chen said he’s familiar with the divisions over vaccination and wants to respect people’s views.
But “I never in my life thought I’d be in a place where I’m getting threatened for trying to play music and spread joy,” he said.
Williams said he did not know of anyone turning to a similar pricing plan. Legal experts told The Post that others in Florida should be wary of following suit, especially when the state’s new law backed by fines takes effect in July.
Such a large price hike for the unvaccinated “violates the spirit” of Florida’s ban on requiring proof of immunization, said Andrew Zelmanowitz, a business lawyer based in Fort Lauderdale. It’s different, he said, from the modest incentive programs many businesses are using to encourage vaccination.
Eric Feldman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school who has expertise in health policy, agreed: “It’s basically saying unless you show us proof of vaccine status, we’re going to treat you really badly.”
Pushaw said that the governor’s office “cannot speculate on what will happen in any specific case” and that the concert would violate the spirit of the executive order.
“There are individuals who have medical issues or religious beliefs that don’t allow them to get vaccinated, and those individuals are members of protected classes,” Pushaw said in an email Saturday. “Also, the governor has been clear on his stance that no one should face discrimination due to vaccination status.”
The executive order says business in Florida may not require “any documentation certifying COVID-19 vaccination or post-transmission recovery to gain access to, entry upon, or service from the business,” similar language to the new law. It says violators are ineligible for state-funded grants or contracts, and it directs state agencies to enforce compliance.
A spokeswoman for Teenage Bottlerocket, Vanessa Burt, said the band understands Williams is operating within the law by offering a discount and has “assured us that he will deal with any hang-ups.”
Williams and Chen said they have gotten support for their promotion of getting vaccinated – but also anger, underscoring the intensity of the country’s resistance to vaccination. The blowback, Williams said, has extended to the concert venue, a St. Petersburg post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).
A man who answered the phone at Post 39 on Saturday said no one was available to talk, but the post seemed to respond to the furor Friday in a Facebook post: “The VFW does not promote any kind of discrimination, this is a place for combat veterans and their families to support each other.”
Dozens of upset people have contacted Williams through his promoter Facebook page, he said. Some are vulgar; some refer to the Holocaust, repeating much-criticized comparisons of vaccination requirements to Nazi persecution and murder of Jews. Williams said that he cannot be sure of the source of a sudden torrent robocalls, but that he was being targeted for his position on vaccinations.
“Your life is fine … and then and then your phone just blows up insane out of nowhere,” he said.
Boris Johnson says I do in private wedding that outfoxes Britains media
LONDON – LONDON – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson married his fiancee, Carrie Symonds, in a secret ceremony at Westminster Cathedral, the first time a British leader has married in office in 199 years.
Johnson, 56, and Symonds, 33, said “I do” at the Roman Catholic church in central London Saturday afternoon in front of a small group of family and friends.
“The Prime Minister and Ms. Symonds were married yesterday afternoon in a small ceremony at Westminster Cathedral,” a Downing Street spokeswoman confirmed Sunday morning. Symonds is taking her husband’s family name and will now be known as Carrie Johnson.
The bride and groom appear to have outfoxed the British media with their top-secret nuptials. Johnson dislikes discussing his private life with the media.
The Sun newspaper reported recently that the couple sent save-the-date cards telling guests they would “celebrate their wedding” on July 30, 2022.
On Saturday evening, the Sun became the first to report the wedding, saying the couple exchanged vows in a Catholic ceremony that caught senior staff off guard.
“Boris Johnson MARRIES Carrie Symonds at Westminster cathedral in ceremony so secret even top aides didn’t know about it,” ran the headline in the Sun.
Downing Street, asked Saturday if the couple were hitched, said “no comment.” But on Sunday morning, with many British newspapers carrying the story on their front pages and the BBC featuring photos of musicians leaving Downing Street on Saturday night, it confirmed the reports.
It also released a photo of the newlyweds smiling at each other in the garden of 10 Downing Street. The bride wore a white dress and a floral headband; the groom, a black suit and blue tie, with a white rose boutonniere.
Conservative lawmaker James Cleverly posted a photo of the newlyweds on social media.
The prime minister’s office said the couple would celebrate with family and friends next summer.
Britain is emerging from its third national lockdown. Weddings are still limited to a maximum of 30 attendees.
The wedding comes at the end of a difficult week for Johnson, whose former chief adviser lashed out at the government’s handling of the pandemic.
Johnson and his wife live with their 1-year-old son, Wilfred, in a lavishly renovated apartment at 11 Downing Street, the financing of which is the subject of several probes. They were the first unwed couple to occupy the government’s Downing Street complex.
The last prime minister to marry while in office was Robert Banks Jenkinson, who married Mary Chester in 1822, after the death of his first wife.
Carrie Johnson, a prominent environmental activist, grew up in southwest London and studied art history and theater at Warwick University before going into politics. She became head of communications for the Conservative Party at 29. She has worked as a special adviser to senior Conservative lawmakers and was on the campaign team to help reelect Johnson when he was mayor of London.
It’s Boris Johnson’s third marriage and Carrie’s first. They announced their engagement in February 2020, the month Johnson reached a divorce settlement with Marina Wheeler, a lawyer and childhood friend with whom he has four children. They separated in 2018.
Johnson met his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, when they were students at Oxford University. They wed in 1987. Less than two weeks after their divorce in 1993, Johnson married Wheeler, who was pregnant with their first child.
The Sun quoted an unnamed staff member saying that when Symonds walked down the aisle, Johnson “didn’t take his eyes off her. They read each other’s vows and then they shared a kiss. They looked besotted.”
Leading scientist says that without a full investigation of lab leak theory, the world will face covid-26 and covid-32
A prominent scientist on Sunday added his voice to the growing number of experts calling for a full investigation into the origins of covid-19, saying the future of public health is at stake.
“There’s going to be covid-26 and covid-32 unless we fully understand the origins of covid-19,” Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor University and a leading expert on the virus, said Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet The Press.” He said coming to firm conclusions about how the virus emerged was “absolutely essential” in preventing future pandemics.
New reports suggest that China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology was at the center of the outbreak, not animal-to-human transmission elsewhere in Wuhan, which was the long-prevalent opinion. President Joe Biden last week ordered a fresh 90-day intelligence review of the virus’s origins with the goal of examining the possibility that it accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab instead of being transmitted from bats or other animals to humans in a zoonotic transmission.
The White House wants a deeper understanding of how a virus that has killed about 600,000 Americans and 3.5 million people worldwide came into existence and has charged the CIA and other agencies with doing more to find out.
Hotez, however, said intelligence-gathering alone wasn’t enough.
“I’m personally of the opinion we’ve pushed intelligence as far as we can. What we need to do is an outbreak investigation,” he said, noting that ideally this would be a six- to 12-month operation in Wuhan, in Hubei province, with scientists on the ground collecting extensive samples and other forensic evidence.
Initially raised as a possibility by then-President Donald Trump and some Republicans on Capitol Hill but dismissed by Democrats and many experts, the lab-leak theory has gained currency in recent weeks. Many experts cite a World Health Organization report from earlier this year mostly dismissing the possibility as co-authored by Chinese scientists and unconvincing.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported last week that a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report had found that three scientists from the lab were hospitalized for symptoms consistent with covid-19 as early as November 2019, before the coronavirus began spreading in China.
Both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have been sounding the call for a deeper inquiry.
“The American people deserve to know about the origins of covid-19,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said on the Senate floor last week before the passage of a bill requiring the declassification of certain covid-19 information. “We have to have answers to these questions,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who is on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and ensured harsh effects from the virus infection.
There may be growing financial pressure, as well. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, on Sunday called for U.S. economic retribution if China doesn’t cooperate.
“My response to this whole thing is supply chain. We need to pull our supply chain out of the region,” McCaul said, citing a range of industries, including medical supplies and semiconductor chips.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “If we can pull these chains out of China, it will hurt them economically . . . and that would be very punitive.” He called Biden’s review “long overdue.”
Experts like Hotez say it would be extremely difficult to get facts about the virus’s origins without Chinese cooperation.
Some experts say they still believe it is very unlikely that the novel coronavirus that causes covid-19 could have come from a lab. But others have noted both the presence of the advanced lab in Wuhan and the lack of horseshoe bats in the city as factors for such a leak.
Former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb said Sunday that the lack of Chinese cooperation provided its own form of circumstantial evidence.
“China could provide evidence that would be exculpatory here,” he said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” noting blood samples from lab workers and source strains of the virus. “They have refused to do that.”
Gottlieb said that knowing conclusively whether the virus came from a lab would help inform future security decisions at such facilities worldwide. “It’s important to understand what the possibility is that this came out of lab so we can focus more international attention on trying to get better inventories around these labs, what they’re doing, better security, make sure they’re properly built,” he said.
The covid inquiry has been delicate for the Biden administration, which needs to balance a desire for scientific truth with concerns about stoking violence against Asian Americans, which has registered an alarming rise since the pandemic’s outbreak.
The White House also must head off geopolitical tensions. China has been pushing back against the growing U.S. call for more transparency.
“The U.S. doesn’t care about facts or truth at all, neither is it interested in a serious scientific study on the origins,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said last week, referencing Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army research laboratory in Maryland. Chinese state media have suggested without evidence that Fort Detrick could be the source of the outbreak. “Its only aim is to use the pandemic for stigmatization and political manipulation to shift the blame.”
Hong Kong Customs seizes heroin worth $29 million from Thai consignment
Hong Kong Customs has confiscated about 23.5 kilograms of suspected heroin with an estimated market value of about $29 million at Kwai Chung Customhouse Cargo Examination Compound on May 27.
Customs officers inspected a seaborne consignment that had arrived from Thailand. Upon examination of the consignment declared as electrical appliances, the suspected heroin was found concealed inside false compartments of 13 water filters and nine coffee machines.
After follow-up investigation, Customs officers arrested two men aged 27 and 47, suspected in connection with the case in Yau Ma Tei and Tsuen Wan respectively on May 28.
Investigation is ongoing.
Under the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, trafficking in a dangerous drug is a serious offence. The maximum penalty upon conviction is a fine of $5 million and life imprisonment.
117 staffers sue over Houston hospitals vaccine mandate, say they dont want to be guinea pigs
A group of 117 unvaccinated staffers from Houston Methodist Hospital filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to avoid the hospitals coronavirus vaccine mandate, saying its unlawful for bosses to require the shots.
The staffers join a growing list of employees challenging compulsory immunizations at businesses, colleges and other workplaces essential to the country’s reopening. Vaccine mandates have faced mounting resistance from anti-vaccination groups and some Republican politicians, even as health officials promote the proven safety of the vaccines and millions of Americans line up to get the shots every week.
The lawsuit against Houston Methodist was filed by Jared Woodfill, a Houston-area attorney and conservative activist. It appears to mirror a legal strategy used by a New York-based law firm, Siri & Glimstad, that is closely aligned with one of the country’s biggest anti-vaccination organizations but unaffiliated with the Houston litigation.
The complaint, filed in state court, says Houston Methodist’s vaccine mandate violates a set of medical ethics standards known as the Nuremberg Code, which was designed to prevent experimentation on human subjects without consent. The code was created after World War II in response to the medical atrocities Nazis committed against prisoners in concentration camps.
“Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment,” the complaint states. It adds that the mandate “requires the employee to subject themselves to medical experimentation as a prerequisite to feeding their families.” Elsewhere, it falsely characterizes the coronavirus vaccines as an “experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection.”
Experts said the notion that the vaccines were “experimental” or based on an untested technology was incorrect.
“This claim is absurd indeed,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, told The Washington Post.
“There were tens of thousands of people who were in the Phase 3 clinical trials for the mRNA vaccines, and no safety concerns were found,” Iwasaki told The Washington Post in an email.
An experimental vaccine is one that has not gone through clinical trials and authorization or approval processes. While the coronavirus vaccines used in the United States have not received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, they have completed rigorous clinical trials and have been authorized for emergency use. Pfizer this month asked the FDA for full approval of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with German company BioNTech.
“After the emergency use authorization of these vaccines, there have since been 100s of millions of people being vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines with excellent safety record,” Iwasaki said.
The assertion that the vaccines alter DNA is also untrue. The mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna are not capable of changing a patient’s DNA, and they do not enter the part of the cell where DNA resides.
“The mRNA vaccines we currently have are as safe or safer than any previously used vaccine,” said Aileen Marty, an infectious-disease expert at Florida International University.
Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist, said it was legal for health-care institutions to require vaccines. Houston Methodist has done so for the flu vaccine for more than a decade.
“As health-care workers, it is our sacred obligation to do whatever we can to protect our patients, who are the most vulnerable in our community,” Boom said in an email Saturday. “We proudly stand by our employees and our mission to protect our patients.”
Boom announced the mandate at the end of March, setting a June 7 deadline for employees to get the shots. As of Saturday, 99% of Houston Methodist’s 26,000 staffers had met the requirements, Boom said.
“It is unfortunate,” he said, “that the few remaining employees who refuse to get vaccinated and put our patients first are responding in this way.”
In their lawsuit, the vaccine holdouts say Boom’s order presented them with a choice: Either get a vaccine they believe may be unsafe or lose their job.
They accuse the hospital system violating state law, as well as federal public health law related to the use of medical products in emergencies, saying coronavirus vaccines have only been authorized for emergency use and therefore cannot be mandated. They want the court to issue an order barring Houston Methodist from terminating the unvaccinated employees.
The lead plaintiff is Jennifer Bridges, a Houston Methodist nurse whose public opposition to the hospital’s vaccine mandate has attracted hundreds of donors on GoFundMe. She told The Washington Post this month that she’s willingly submitted to “every vaccine known to man,” but believes the coronavirus vaccines need further study. Other plaintiffs include receptionists, technicians, administrative workers and nurses at the hospital, which is part of the Texas Medical Center, one of the largest medical complexes in the world.
The lawsuit, and similar cases making their way through the court system, could test whether employers can require employee vaccinations as the country navigates out of a pandemic that has killed nearly 600,000 Americans. There’s little case law governing when compulsory vaccinations are permissible, but the magnitude of the public health crisis may leave judges inclined to give employers leeway to require the shots.
Most employers have avoided mandates, but many universities have implemented them.
An update to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s vaccine guidelines may give employers more wiggle room. The agency said Friday that employers could require their staffers physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for the coronavirus so long as they make accommodations for an employee’s disability and religious beliefs.
The update included a caveat about mandating shots. “Employers should keep in mind that because some individuals or demographic groups may face greater barriers to receiving a covid-19 vaccination than others,” it said, “some employees may be more likely to be negatively impacted by a vaccination requirement.”
Biden budget lifts restriction on funds for abortions, keeps ban on pot sales
WASHINGTON – President Joe Bidens proposed budget removes a provision that blocks D.C. from using local tax dollars to cover abortions for low-income women – but preserves a ban on selling and taxing marijuana in the nations capital, a blow to city leaders.
The spending plan released Friday also boosts money for the District’s Tuition Assistance Grants, which subsidize tuition at state universities for most D.C. residents.
In addition, Democratic Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s nonvoting representative in the House, said the White House has indicated it wants to start “winding down” a Republican-backed federal voucher program that offers taxpayer-funded private school scholarships to low-income D.C. students.
Each program or restriction is an example of the ways in which Congress wields unusual power over governance in the District of Columbia, which has pushed for years to become an independent state.
The Biden administration’s decision to remove the D.C. abortion rider appears to be in line with the president’s proposed elimination of the Hyde Amendment, which has barred states from using federal funds for abortion since 1976.
The D.C.-specific restriction, strongly backed by Republican lawmakers, means low-income women also could not get funding from the District government to help them access abortion services.
Congress can make changes as it considers Biden’s spending plan, and Republicans could put up a prolonged fight, based on their strong belief that taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund abortions. But Norton said she’s optimistic that Democrats’ narrow control of both chambers will make it harder for Republicans to restore the rider.
“It is the longest-standing rider we have had since I’ve been in Congress,” Norton said. “It’s really been the hardest to remove. Considering its widespread effects, that is a major improvement and accomplishment.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, Congress has placed some limit or prohibition on the use of taxpayer money to fund abortions in the District since 1979, with a short-lived reprieve in 2010. City leaders accused President Barack Obama in subsequent years of using the D.C. abortion rider as a “bargaining chip” in budget debates to avert a federal government shutdown.
Laura Meyers, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, described Biden’s move as “tremendous” for women in D.C. – as long as Congress sustains it.
“Because D.C. is not a state, D.C. cannot use its locally raised tax dollars the way 17 other states do to provide equal and equitable access to abortion for women,” she said. “And of course the burden falls disproportionately on people and communities of color.”
Norton said she planned to push her Democratic colleagues to remove both the abortion rider and the marijuana rider from the federal budget. She said she had a hard time squaring Biden’s decision to remove one rider but keep another, finding it “inconsistent” with the president’s strong backing of D.C. statehood.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee on financial services and general government, said he will oppose the inclusion in the budget of any provisions “that dictate to the District of Columbia what its laws should be or how it spends its money.”
“In my view, the Congress has no business substituting its judgment for the decisions of the elected representatives of the District of Columbia,” he said in an interview.
D.C. residents can possess and grow small amounts of marijuana, thanks to a voter-approved law from 2014. But the federal rider prohibits the city from regulating and taxing recreational sales of the drug, blocking the opening of recreational marijuana dispensaries and a potentially lucrative revenue option.
D.C. Council member Janeese Lewis George, D-Ward 4 said she and her colleagues fully expected that Biden would support the removal of the rider. In anticipation of such a change, Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser in February proposed the Safe Cannabis Sales Act of 2021, which would legalize recreational dispensaries, require automatic expungement of criminal records for certain marijuana convictions and distribute marijuana sales tax revenue to certain wards and programs to help disadvantaged residents.
“The feeling among all of us is disappointment and shock,” Lewis George said Friday of Biden’s inclusion of the rider in the budget. Especially after the economically devastating coronavirus pandemic, she said, the city was looking to generate more revenue with marijuana sales – and boost entrepreneurial opportunities in the Black community, which was disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about Biden’s decision to keep the rider in place. Press secretary Jen Psaki has previously said Biden supports states’ rights to legalize recreational marijuana, but the president has stopped short of endorsing legalization himself.
On the education front, Norton said the Biden administration is seeking to stop adding new students to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which was created by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2004. It is the only federally funded school choice program in the country.
The program is generally opposed by public school advocates, teachers unions and many Democrats. Bowser, however, has not lobbied to eliminate it – citing concern that doing so could jeopardize federal school funding for D.C. public and charter schools.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the scholarship program.
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