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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Says There Will Be No Children’s COVID Vaccine Mandate
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis drew a line in the sand Thursday, telling reporters he is against mandatory COVID-19 vaccine shots for children.
On Wednesday, a panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted to add the vaccine to the recommended Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program. It would not make the shots mandatory.
“As long as I’m kicking and screaming, there will be no COVID shot mandates for your kids,” DeSantis said during a speech to announce an executive order to provide property tax relief for residents impacted by Hurricane Ian. “That is your decision to make as a parent.”
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo tweeted about the CDC panel a day before the vote, saying nothing would change in Florida, whatever the result.
If You Live in One of These Cities, There’s Probably a Security Camera Pointed at Your Face Right Now
Despite claiming the title of the world’s bastion of freedom, the U.S. doesn’t always feel so free. It’s no secret that government and corporate surveillance in this country have gotten a little out of hand in recent years — and, according to some studies, Americans consistently rank as some of the world’s most surveilled people.
One study published last year showed that America actually ranks #2 in surveillance globally — and another from several years back found that several U.S. cities ranked as some of the most spied upon in the world. Thankfully, China is still beating us overall — for the time being. But that’s not really saying much since China is an authoritarian technocracy with little regard for the civil liberties that Americans are ostensibly owed.
It doesn’t make Comparitech’s list, but the Big Apple is clearly another one of the most surveilled American cities, because duh. Before a few weeks ago, New York was already held together by an army of cops, a broad network of municipal security cameras (at least 15,000, according to reports) and a weirdly unaccountable private surveillance fund.
Now, in an effort to curb spiking crime rates, the city has decided to turn its subway system into a giant surveillance apparatus: in September, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration announced it would be installing security cameras in every single train car in the city. She said of the cameras, “You think Big Brother is watching you on the subway? You’re absolutely right. That is our intent.”
TikTok Parent ByteDance Planned to Use TikTok to Monitor the Physical Location of Specific American Citizens
A China-based team at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes.
The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show.
It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans were actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices.
The material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance’s Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any other purposes. Forbes is not disclosing the nature and purpose of the planned surveillance referenced in the materials in order to protect sources. TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit has specifically targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.
Health System Discloses Breach Tied to Online Data Tracker
Personal health information of up to 3 million patients in Illinois and Wisconsin may have been exposed to outside companies through tracking technology used on a large hospital system’s electronic health records website.
Advocate Aurora Health, which operates 27 hospitals, said in a statement that the breach may have exposed information including patients’ medical providers, the type of appointments or medical procedures, dates and locations of scheduled appointments and IP addresses. The system said its investigation found no social security number, financial information or credit and debit card numbers were involved.
The system blamed the breach on its use of pixels — computer code that collects information on how a user interacts with a website — including products developed by Google and Facebook’s parent company Meta that make the collected data accessible to those companies.
The healthcare industry’s use of pixels has come under wide criticism from privacy advocates who warn that the technology’s use violates federal patient privacy law.
Washington State University Dropping COVID Vaccine Requirement for Most Employees
Washington State University announced it will soon eliminate a COVID-19 vaccine requirement for most employees, contractors, and volunteers. WSU said the change was “due in part to the success of previous COVID-19 vaccination efforts.”
Despite the announcement for staff, COVID-19 vaccines will still be required for students.
Washington State University made news in October 2021 when the school fired head football coach Nick Rolovich. Rolovich applied for a religious exemption to the state mandate that all state employees must get vaccinated for COVID-19.
The exemption request was denied and WSU said that they could not make appropriate accommodations for Rolovich if he was unvaccinated. Rolovich has since filed a tort suit against the state, seeking $25 million in damages for wrongful termination.
Governor Bill Lee Says Tennessee Families Won’t Be Impacted by CDC Vote
Republican Governor of Tennessee Bill Lee weighed in on the COVID vaccine mandate debate on Thursday after an advisory group recommended the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) add the shot to the vaccine schedule.
On Thursday, every member of the panel voted to have the vaccine included in the vaccine schedule, and the CDC now has the final say in whether the shot is added. States and local governments are in charge of making decisions and regulations regarding what vaccines kids need to get in order to attend school.
Governor Lee tweeted about his approach to vaccine mandates, stating, “I’ve always said mandates are the wrong approach, & TN has led in pushing back on federal COVID vaccine requirements.”
U.S. Might Bail Musk out by Blocking Twitter Deal Over National Security
After the richest man in the world, Elon Musk decided he would move forward with his plan to buy Twitter for what experts say is nearly four times its current worth, even Twitter doubted that Musk actually meant to see the deal through. Now, as Musk remains under federal investigation for his merger conduct, The Washington Post reports that if Musk does take over Twitter, he plans to gut Twitter’s staff by 75%.
And Bloomberg reports that the Biden administration is considering launching national security reviews into Musk’s Twitter and Starlink satellite Internet deals. Those reviews could end up blocking the Twitter deal after all, which many commenters think is exactly what Musk wants.
None of this seems good for Twitter. Yesterday in pre-market trading, Twitter shares fell by as much as 16%.
Chinese Censors Remove Reports of Teen’s Death in COVID Quarantine Facility
Hong Kong Free Press reported:
Chinese censors on Friday scrubbed reports that a teenager had died in a quarantine facility after the case sparked anger and prompted citizens to question the country’s zero-COVID policy.
China is the last major country committed to a zero-tolerance COVID strategy, responding to dozens of outbreaks with lockdowns and sending entire neighborhoods out to makeshift quarantine facilities.
But the public has chafed against virus restrictions, sometimes responding to fresh lockdowns with protests, while scuffles have broken out between citizens and officials.
Posts circulated on Chinese social media this week saying a 14-year-old girl had died in the central city of Ruzhou after falling ill in a quarantine facility and being denied prompt medical care.
‘Poster Girl’ Explores the Surveillance State’s Allure
Veronica Roth is the author of the bestselling Divergent novels, which were adapted into a series of popular films. Her new novel Poster Girl tells the story of Sonya Kantor, a young woman raised in an authoritarian society in near-future Seattle.
“I wanted her to be not a typical hero figure, but to be someone who’s complicit in the authoritarian regime that fell, and struggling with how she understands that, and how she’s been manipulated by this system,” Roth says in Episode 528 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
Poster Girl imagines the ultimate surveillance state, where every action is recorded and judged by ubiquitous ocular implants. Roth says it was all too easy for her to imagine how Sonya might enjoy being constantly monitored and rewarded for her good behavior.
Roth says the United States is closer to becoming a surveillance state than we’d like to think, and that researching all the ways in which our devices are tracking us has made her increasingly paranoid.
Conspiracy Theories Spread Quickly on TikTok. Health Officials Need to Be as Fast
Misinformation spreads so quickly that public health officials should be monitoring social media platforms in real-time to debunk bogus claims as fast as possible, a new study suggested.
Over the course of one day, May 20, the study identified 153 English-language videos with monkeypox conspiracy theories on the social platform TikTok. The videos had been posted a median of 30 hours before, and in total, they’d already received 1,485,911 views according to the study published in the medical journal JAMA Network Tuesday.
TikTok has more than 1 billion users monthly, the study says, and public health officials need to identify and disprove deception on social platforms before it spreads.
