Connect with us

COVID-19

WHO Chief urges governments to ‘bring back face masks’ and Los Angeles may be first

Published

on

Mask Mandate

Americans fought for their freedom from mandates surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic for over two years and the World Health Organization and city of Los Angeles may take it all back in the blink of an eye.

The Associated Press reports “Los Angeles County, home to 10 million residents, is facing a return to a broad indoor mask mandate later this month if current trends in hospital admissions continue, county health Director Barbara Ferrer said this week.”

On Tuesday, the White House response team urged all adults 50 and older to get a booster shot if they haven’t yet this year. The White House also suggested getting any available booster shot, and not wait for the next wave.

The AP notes that the latest variant, BA.5, is highly transmissible and now accounts for 65% of cases. Its “cousin” BA.4 makes up another 16% of cases. “The variants have shown a remarkable ability to get around the protection offered by vaccination.”

World Health Organization Chief Dr Ghebreyesus is urging all governments to reinstate Covid measures like masking and ventilation due to an “increasing trend of deaths”

“I am concerned that cases of Covid-19 continue to rise – putting further pressure on stretched health systems and health workers,” he said. Governments should “deploy tried and tested measures like masking, improved ventilation and test and treat protocols.”

Requiring masks again “helps us to reduce risk,” Ferrer told Los Angeles County supervisors. She is expected to discuss details of the potential new county mandate during a public health briefing Thursday afternoon.

“I do recognize that when we return to universal indoor masking to reduce high spread, for many this will feel like a step backwards,” Ferrer said Tuesday.

For most of the pandemic, Los Angeles County has required masks in some indoor spaces, including health care facilities, Metro trains and buses, airports, jails and homeless shelters. The new mandate would expand the requirement to all indoor public spaces, including shared offices, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, retail stores, restaurants and bars, theaters and schools.

 

 

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

COVID-19

Former Harvard medical professor says he was fired for opposing Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates

Published

on

Covid

“My hope is that someday, Harvard will find its way back to academic freedom and independence.” That is the heartfelt message from Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard University professor of medicine since 2003, who recently announced publicly he was fired for “clinging to the truth” in his opposition to Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

Kulldorff posted the news on social media alongside an essay published in the City Journal last week. The epidemiologist and biostatistician also spoke with National Review about the incident. Kulldorff says he was fired by the Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham hospital system and put on a leave of absence by Harvard Medical School in November 2021 over his stance on Covid.

Nearly two years later, in October 2023, his leave of absence was terminated as a matter of policy, marking the end of his time at the university. Harvard severed ties with Kulldorff “all on their initiative,” he said.

The history of the medical professional’s public stance on Covid-19 vaccines and mandates is detailed by National Review:

Censorship and rejection led Kulldorff to co-author the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 alongside Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University. Together, the three public-health scientists argued for limited and targeted Covid-19 restrictions that “protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives,” as Kulldorff put it in his essay.

“The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous,” he wrote, naming former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins as the one who ordered a “devastating published takedown” of the declaration.

Testifying before Congress in January, Collins reaffirmed his previous statements attacking the Great Barrington Declaration.

Despite the coordinated effort against it, the document has over 939,000 signatures in favor of age-based focused protection.

The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors, who advocated the quick reopening of schools, have been vindicated by recent studies that confirm pandemic-era school closures were, in fact, detrimental to student learning. The data show that students from third through eighth grade who spent most of the 2020–21 school year in remote learning fell more than half a grade behind in math scores on average, while those who attended school in person dropped a little over a third of a grade, according to a New York Times review of existing studies. In addition to learning losses, school closures did very little to stop the spread of Covid, studies show.

Continue Reading

Trending