Category: Public safety & health
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Camping’s COVID Killjoys
by Kerry Dougherty Someone call a lawyer. I have whiplash. Happens every time I try to make sense make of America’s top health “experts” and their contradictory opinions, which have a peculiar way of becoming policy. Especially in blue states with governors eager to please the president. Ahem. Just this past weekend, for instance, Dr.…
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UVa in the Age of Covidiocy
by Walter Smith In late February of 2020 my oldest son traveled to Kansas City to meet with a group of Californians. Upon his return, he felt beat. Attributing his fatigue to work and travel, he soon felt better and came to our house a number of times. Our youngest began to feel poorly. After…
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Mentally Ill in Jails, Part 3: Costs, Legislative Initiatives, and a Modest Proposal
By Dick Hall-Sizemore (Note: This is the third, and final, post in a series examining the issue of mentally ill people being held in jails. Earlier posts can be found here and here.) Costs. In comments to the previous installments, several readers brought up the issue of the cost of providing services for the mentally ill…
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COVID Panic Porn and the American Left
by Kerry Dougherty Last month I gave blood at a local church. As I was leaving, I struggled with my raincoat and a very nice woman standing nearby said she’d like to help, “…but with Covid…” I said “thanks” and felt sorry for her. She honestly believed that grabbing the sleeve of my twisted jacket…
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Vaccine Passports: Let’s Pass
by Kerry Dougherty Want a peek at what some of the more authoritarian types in the U.S. have planned for you? Look no farther than St. Vincent, a lovely little archipelago in the Windward Islands. At least it used to be a lovely little island. On April 9 the most dangerous volcano in the Caribbean…
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New COVID Data Dump
by James A. Bacon New Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association (VHHA) data shows the impact of Governor Ralph Northam’s executive order banning elective surgeries last year. Hospital discharges across Virginia plunged from nearly 17,000 per week when the first COVID-19 cases were reported in the state to less than 12,000 — a drop of 31%.…
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Johnson & Johnson Danger: Same As Getting Struck By Lightning
by Kerry Dougherty Here’s a prediction: We’re going to see a drop-off in the number of people being vaccinated against COVID-19. Thanks to bungling and fear-mongering by government officials. Currently 3.1 million Americans are getting the vaccines daily. Analysts will try to blame and drop on the Johnson & Johnson blood-clot scare — more about…
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Where’s the Vaccine Outreach to Southwest Virginia?
by James A. Bacon It turns out that blacks and Hispanics are not the only population sub-groups in Virginia who are resisting the idea of getting vaccinated against COVID-19. So are rural, non-college-educated whites in Appalachia, reports the Roanoke Times. Hesitancy has dropped among blacks and Hispanics, but concerns among rural whites have increased that…
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Back to Normal: Old Guys First
The COVID-19 epidemic ain’t over, and new variants of the virus may be super contagious, but most of my old-guy friends have been double-vaccinated and, by Jove, we’re busting out of the house. Tonight I’m getting together with some buddies, all of whom have been double-vaccinated like myself, and we’re going to eat indoors! Like…
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The New Racism at a Danville Vaccination Clinic
by James A. Bacon Remember that COVID-vaccination clinic in Danville where so few locals were getting shots that people, mostly students, were driving in from out of town to avoid the long waits elsewhere? Concerned about the “equity” implications of all those white people getting vaccinated while blacks and Hispanics were not, the Northam administration…
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Inside the Bubble the Slightest Breeze Is a Threat
This is the fourth column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University. by Joe Fitzgerald The Breeze was always the “award-winning student newspaper” in JMU public relations — until the paper began filing Freedom of Information requests with the administration. The battle became public when the school decided to give the local…
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Teachers, Your Commute Puts You at More Risk than In-Person Classes
The fatality risk of teaching a class in-person during the COVID-19 epidemic last fall was comparable to the risk of driving 16 miles in a car. That is the top-line conclusion of a study based on extensive data from North Carolina, Wisconsin, Australia, England, and Israel covering almost 80 million person-days in school. That study.…
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Northam’s Vaccine Quotas
by Carol J. Bova Reporter Sabrina Moreno asked Dr. Danny Avula at a Virginia Department of Health (VDH) teleconference on March 26 if Virginia planned to do what Maryland’s governor had done a few weeks previously in reserving a portion of doses at each of its COVID-19 vaccination sites “for priority populations, you know, Black…
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Halt 5G in Virginia Now!
Virginians for Safe Technology has launched a petition to halt the deployment of 5G wireless technology. Bacon’s Rebellion does not endorse the petition but does believe that the issues it raises are worth discussing. Next-generation wireless is critical infrastructure. The sooner the concerns are addressed, the better. — JAB To our elected and appointed officials…
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Everybody’s Next One
This is the second column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University. by Joe Fitzgerald JMU was a first choice for many of its students, but has a perennial reputation as Virginia’s safety school. The joke is that JMU stands for “Just Missed UVA.” The acceptance rate has been rising since the…