Quietly and over some objections, national digital vaccine card has emerged

Whether they realize it or not, about 200 million people in the United States now likely have access to a Covid-19 digital vaccine card.

The digital pass known as the SMART Health Card is voluntary and minimal by design to protect personal information. It has a person’s name, date of birth and the dates and brands of vaccination doses, all contained within a type of scannable bar code known as a QR code.

And after a relatively quiet start, it has built momentum in recent months as more states and companies have signed on, making it something of a de facto national digital vaccine card.

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Truth Leaks Out

The COVID origins scandal was genuine, worthy of the world’s best investigative reporters—who ignored it.

The quest for truth-in-COVID did pick up some steam in late spring 2021.

Not about the vaccine, though.

About the origins of the virus.

From the first days of the epidemic, strong circumstantial evidence suggested Sars-CoV-2 had leaked from a Chinese lab. Both the virus itself and the facts around its emergence pointed to human intervention.

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Liberal MP backs anti-vax tax proposal as COVID cases surge

A Liberal MP who works as a medical doctor says he’s in favour of making unvaccinated Canadians pay some kind of a special tax — and he believes others in his party agree.

“We already have taxes on tobacco. We have taxes on alcohol, which are there for similar reasons because people who consume those products are more likely to end up in the hospital,” said MP Marcus Powlowski in a panel discussion with fellow MPs airing Saturday on CBC’s The House. “And as a result, we’re all going to have to pay for their hospitalization.”

That means we can Tax Communist China right?

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Conrad Black: In the face of Omicron, Canada once again cowers in unnecessary fear

It is time for practically every jurisdiction in the western world to acknowledge that they have dismally failed to manage the COVID crisis. We almost all failed to learn promptly from the unfolding facts of the illness. It seems now to be fairly well-established that the Chinese, with the complicity of the World Health Organization on which it has excessive influence, withheld the gravity of coronavirus from the world while allowing it to be exported around the globe, before suppressing it within China in the most authoritarian manner. China gained a great strategic victory as the rest of the world closed down like idiots. In the United States, the wall-to-wall anti-Trump national political media and Democratic party strategists saw very quickly an opportunity to retrieve an election that, as the coronavirus pandemic began, appeared likely to be won by President Donald Trump.

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Why are COVID deaths rising during the Omicron wave?

I remember writing around New Year’s that although cases in the U.S. were exploding, deaths had actually dropped slightly over the preceding two weeks. That was evidence that the new variant wasn’t just milder than its predecessors but a hopeful sign that it might be supplanting Delta in the population, driving the old variant to extinction.

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How COVID-19 made Canada comfortable with marginalizing 3.7 million people

If you are an adult Canadian who has not received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, you are barred from virtually all forms of government employment. By federal mandate, hundreds of unvaccinated police officers, health-care workers, bus drivers and firefighters were placed onto unpaid leave just before Christmas and are explicitly barred from collecting Employment Insurance.

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Hospital System Drops Race-Based COVID Treatment Policy After Lawsuit Threats

One of the largest hospital systems in the country is dropping its policy that counted race as a more important factor in determining COVID-19 treatment options than diabetes, obesity, asthma, and hypertension combined.

This silliness was allowed at SSM Health, a nominally Catholic health system that operates 23 hospitals across Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. All hospital patients are “scored” as a means of triage in order to give those most in need priority treatment. SSM Health ignored the severity of a patient’s conditions in order to make race a weightier determining factor.

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Ontario reports lotsa new Covid cases … and Canadian COVID-19 vaccine study seized on by anti-vaxxers!

Ontario reports lotsa new Covid cases … and Canadian COVID-19 vaccine study seized on by anti-vaxxers!

Ontario reports 43 new COVID-19 deaths; record 3,957 hospitalizations

Ontario reported 43 new COVID-19 deaths as the province hit another record number of hospitalizations due to the Omicron variant.

The Ministry of Health says there are 3,957 patients in hospitals across the province due to the virus, breaking yesterday’s record of 3,814 and up from 2,594 a week ago.


Canadian COVID-19 vaccine study seized on by anti-vaxxers — highlighting dangers of early research in pandemic

A Canadian study that vastly underestimated the protection COVID-19 vaccines provide against the Omicron variant is being revised — but not before it spread widely on social media by anti-vaxxers, academics and even the creators of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine.

The Ontario preprint study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, suggested that any three doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were just 37 per cent effective against Omicron infection, while two doses actually showed negative protection.

The preprint has been shared on Twitter more than 15,000 times in the two weeks since it’s been published, according to Altmetric, a company that tracks where published research is posted online. That’s in the top five per cent of all research it’s ever tracked.

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Trudeau plays dangerous game demanding U.S. truckers have shots

Canada plans to start turning away unvaccinated U.S. truckers at the border this weekend, a move that threatens to upend the flow of everything from food to auto parts to building supplies between two of the world’s largest trading partners.

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Non-whites given preferential access to rare Covid treatment – lawsuit

Utah is facing legal action over its move to include race as a determining factor in treatment decisions

Health authorities in Utah and Minnesota have come under pressure after claims emerged that non-whites were given two extra points on a risk-based scorecard for deciding whether patients would receive Covid antibody treatment.

On Wednesday, Fox News reported that America First Legal, a conservative law group founded by former Donald Trump ally Stephen Miller, was threatening the states of Utah and Minnesota with legal action.

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Rex Murphy: Trudeau Liberals no longer care about Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms

B.C., or Before COVID, if you were searching for pure rhapsody in political circles, then you had little to explore. Head to any high-toned Liberal gathering, one of their festal summits where the glories and landmarks of Liberal tenure were, almost liturgically, being celebrated, and inevitably some chosen hero of the Liberal moment would expatiate on the monumental achievements of 1982.

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Over 900 unvaccinated members of CAF to face formal proceedings

The Department of National Defence says formal proceedings have been launched against more than 900 members of the Canadian Armed Forces for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

Chief of the defence staff Gen. Wayne Eyre ordered all military personnel to attest to having been fully vaccinated by mid-October. The deadline was later extended to mid-December.

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