Reports indicate as much as $400 billion in COVID-19 unemployment relief were likely lost to waste and fraudsters. Lawmakers want answers.
Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor demanding documents and information related to the unemployment fraud.
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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has ended the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its personnel, according to a memorandum exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“CBP is halting the COVID-19 screening program, and employees may choose to withdraw their pending reasonable accommodation requests for screening exemption,” an internal CBP memorandum stated. National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd confirmed to the DCNF that both the vaccine mandate and testing requirements have been lifted.
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Virginia’s Amtrak service ridership hit 105,689 in September, up from the pre-pandemic 76,793 riders in September 2019, for 37.6 percent growth. That’s also an improvement from September 2021 ridership at 50,776.
In a Thursday press release, the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority said “the numbers show the strong rebound in post-pandemic travel with every route seeing an increase.”
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Dr. Peter McCullough, world-renowned cardiologist and internist, is fighting back against the radicalized American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), which stripped him of his board certifications in internal medicine and cardiology because of his testimony in Senate subcommittee hearings regarding the risks of the COVID-19 “vaccines” – information that countered that of the federal government.
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In a survey, Virginia’s school staff rated a rise in student behavior problems the most serious problem they’re facing. The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) conducted the survey as part of a study of the impact of COVID-19 on K-12 education.
“The pandemic was an unprecedented disruption for K through 12 students and staff, ” JLARC Chief Legislative Analyst Joe McMahon told a General Assembly committee on Monday. “As students returned to in-person learning, chronic absenteeism, classroom behavior, and reported mental health issues have worsened.”
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A group of California physicians filed a lawsuit against Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s medical board over a new law that will regulate what doctors can tell patients about COVID-19 risks and treatments.
A.B. 2098 will make it “unprofessional conduct” for physicians or surgeons to provide their patients “false information” related to COVID-19, including vaccines, “that is contradicted by “contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.” The legislation discriminates against alternative viewpoints and creates “a severe chilling effect,” contradicting the First Amendment, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA)-backed lawsuit contends.
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Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, sold as helping the nation recover from the economic crisis sparked by COVID-19, provided funds to begin “guaranteed basic income” programs in at least two dozen cities across the country.
More than $222 million from the legislation has gone to some of America’s largest cities—including Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Seattle, New Orleans, and Chicago—for pilot programs that would dole out money to low-income residents, in most cases for one or two years.
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The opioid epidemic in Virginia cost almost $3.5 billion in 2020, according to a new cost calculator from the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) and the Virginia Commonwealth University. On average, over four Virginians died of an opioid overdose each day in 2020, according to a VDH announcement of the cost calculator.
“This burden is carried by Virginia’s workers, employers, and governments, and includes both future losses and current direct spending that could have been avoided,” the calculator’s site explains. “Virginia families and businesses take on a large amount of these costs, mostly due to lost future worker productivity. Federal, state, and local governments also see increased healthcare and government costs and lost future tax revenues. The cost burden of the opioid epidemic is split among several sectors.”
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RICHMOND, Virginia — Virginia’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are “catastrophic,” Governor Glenn Youngkin said in a press conference Monday morning, hours after the NAEP scores were released. Nationally, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a press release the scores are “appalling.” Virginia’s Republican education administration blamed the Commonwealth’s scores on Democratic policy under previous administrations predating COVID-19, while Cardona said the national results are “a reminder of the impact that this pandemic has had on our learners.”
“Today’s data release is a clear and heart-wrenching statement that Virginia is failing her students,” Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera said at the conference, and said the results are not a surprise. “Recent date from the ACT, SOLs [Standards of Learning], from the PALS data, and today’s catastrophic decline in Virginia’s NAEP scores are a predictable outcome of the decade-long systemic dismantling of a foundational commitment to excellence in education.”
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A new documentary about the face of the COVID-19 pandemic response in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, received 125,000 views on its opening day Tuesday, according to a press release.
The film, called The Real Anthony Fauci, is based on a book called The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
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A documentary about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of America’s COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, and restrictions, is set to debut in only a few days.
“The Real Anthony Fauci, the latest film from documentary filmmaker Jeff Hays exposes the motivations behind “America’s Doctor” to issue unquestioned edicts that upended everyday life during the Covid-19 pandemic,” according to a press release. “Fauci has drawn criticism from a number of fronts. The film is based on the runaway bestselling book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.”
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Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech announced Wednesday the Biden Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for their “bivalent” mRNA COVID-19 booster shot for children aged 5-11 years without having completed clinical trials.
“As families across the country take part in fall festivities and plan for the upcoming holiday season, we aim to provide school-aged children with additional protection against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants, which continue to account for more than 80% of cases in the U.S.,” said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. “Anticipating this need, we manufactured millions of booster doses, which will be made available, pending CDC recommendation, to help families stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccinations.”
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A top Pfizer international executive admitted to a European Parliament committee Tuesday that the pharmaceutical giant did not test its COVID mRNA shot for whether it could prevent transmission of the virus before it was placed on the market and then mandated in many parts of society throughout the world.
Rob Roos, a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, tweeted a video of his exchange with Janine Small, president of international developed markets at Pfizer.
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A U.S. Army pilot who reluctantly received a COVID-19 vaccination has been reprimanded and denied promotion — and could still face discharge and the loss of his wings — after questioning the vaccine and filing complaints about allegedly biased investigations of him, according to his wife and her attorney.
Jessica Hill-Budge, the wife of Chief Warrant Officer 3 Brandon Budge in the 7th Infantry Division’s 16th Combat Aviation Brigade, told Just the News that her husband is likely to lose his nearly 20-year military career due to improperly conducted official investigations of his case.
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Social media giant Twitter first blocked, then restored, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s tweet regarding the state health department’s guidance in which is noted a study showing an “84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination COVID-19 mRNA shots.”
“Today, we released an analysis on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines the public needs to be aware of,” Ladapo tweeted. “This analysis showed an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39. FL will not be silent on the truth.”
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Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D. told attendees at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in Connecticut Thursday evening that government health agencies that forced lockdowns and mass vaccinations to manage the COVID-19 pandemic have thrown the basic principles of public health “out the window.”
Swedish native Kulldorff, who is on leave from Harvard University and is a founding fellow of Hillsdale’s Academy for Science and Freedom, is also a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published in October 2020 that has since been translated into 44 languages and signed by nearly one million scientists, physicians, and citizens.
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Two California doctors filed a federal lawsuit that seeks to block a California law signed by Governor Gavin Newsom (D) last week that threatens the free speech rights of physicians to provide full informed consent to their patients about the risks of COVID-19 mRNA shots and benefits of early treatment with off-label drugs.
The new law threatens to punish doctors who do not support the government’s established narrative, called the “scientific consensus,” on COVID-19 with revocation of their license, and livelihood.
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Virginia has 15,338 state employees teleworking at least one day a week, according to a September 30 report from the Department of Human Resource Management (DHRM). That’s up from pre-pandemic 5,664 employees in 2019; Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration said the increase is good.
“As of September 7, 2022, 42 percent of classified executive branch employees were eligible for telework. Of those, 66 percent have approved telework agreements in place. This is significantly higher than employees eligible (26 percent) and approved for telework (37 percent) in 2019,” the report states.
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A former National Guardsman who sought a religious exemption to the military COVID-19 vaccine mandate was given the mRNA shot instead of an inoculation for the flu “accidentally,” according to the service.
After refusing the COVID vaccine multiple times and requesting a religious exemption to the mandate, former Maine National Guard Specialist Mathew Bouchard was given the mRNA shot instead of the flu vaccine months before he was to leave the service, he told Just the News on Thursday.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Friday a bill that allows the medical boards of California to be used as government overseers as they discipline doctors who provide their patients with informed consent about the risks of the COVID-19 mRNA shots and the benefits of early treatment for COVID disease with off-label drugs.
Newman signed AB 2098, which labels as “unprofessional conduct,” a doctor’s discussion about the benefits of early treatment of COVID with effective, readily available, and inexpensive medications already in use for years.
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Spotsylvania middle school English-as-second language [ESL] teacher Fabiana Parker is the 2023 Virginia Teacher of the Year, making her Virginia’s nominee for National Teacher of the Year.
“Teachers play a critical role in the success of every learner and child in Virginia and Fabiana is the best of the best,” Governor Glenn Youngkin said in a Virginia Department of Education press release. “Growing up as an ESL student, Fabiana knows firsthand the challenges her students face. She began her career as an educator as a girl teaching her grandmother to read. She has helped hundreds of students find a path to success by equipping them with the English skills necessary to prosper academically and in life.”
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The Defense Department’s inspector general has alerted the secretary of defense to apparent blanket denials of religious accommodation requests (RAR) for exemptions from the military COVID-19 vaccine mandate, which would be a violation of federal law.
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Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) once again battled with White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci Wednesday about whether children with natural immunity from a prior COVID infection should be injected with the mRNA shots the government has referred to as “vaccines.”
“Dr. Fauci continues to lie, cover-up, and deny the science to promote himself,” tweeted Paul about his tense exchange with Fauci during a Senate committee hearing whose central focus was the federal response to monkeypox.
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A new pre-print study by nine health experts from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and other top universities found that COVID-19 boosters administered to young adults cause 18 to 98 serious adverse events for each COVID hospitalization prevented.
The study—posted Monday on The Social Science Research Network (SSRN)—concluded that mandatory booster vaccination in college is “ethically unjustifiable.” The paper is titled, “COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment and Five Ethical Arguments against Mandates at Universities.”
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Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson condemned Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky for failing to substantively respond to inquiries into the agency’s monitoring of adverse COVID-19 vaccine effects.
Johnson initially wrote to Walensky in both June and July asking as to the agency’s methods for monitoring vaccine side effects. He received a reply on Sept. 2 in which Walensky largely discussed the use of the data mining method the CDC employed. She said the CDC used Empirical Bayesian (EB) data mining as its primary method and only used the proportional reporting ratio (PRR) to verify EB results.
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President Joe Biden is being mocked after he made a garbled claim that he is reducing the deficit this year by one trillion, five hundred thousand dollars, with the number being especially awkward given the vast difference between trillions and hundreds of thousands.
“You know how much, how much I’m reducivethedefcit this year? One trillion, five hundred thousand!” Biden said during a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, Wisc. It appears the president was attempting to say he’s “reducing the deficit this year.”
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After adding more routes in Virginia, ridership on four state-supported Amtrak routes hit all-time highs in July, beating pre-pandemic levels with 110,256 passengers.
“These numbers make it very clear – Virginians want more passenger rail to be a part of their transportation network,” Virginia Passenger Rail Authority (VRPA) Chief Operating Officer Mike McLaughlin said in a press release. “With the launch of two new roundtrips and the resumption of another, we know that rail works for the Commonwealth and look forward to further expanding service throughout the state.”
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After adding more routes in Virginia, ridership on four state-supported Amtrak routes hit all-time highs in July, beating pre-pandemic levels with 110,256 passengers.
“These numbers make it very clear – Virginians want more passenger rail to be a part of their transportation network,” Virginia Passenger Rail Authority (VRPA) Chief Operating Officer Mike McLaughlin said in a press release. “With the launch of two new roundtrips and the resumption of another, we know that rail works for the Commonwealth and look forward to further expanding service throughout the state.”
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The Biden education department announced Thursday that U.S. students’ plummeting scores in reading and math during the COVID-19 pandemic is all due to former President Donald Trump.
“Today’s data confirm the significant impact the prior Administration’s mismanagement of the pandemic has had on our children’s progress and academic wellbeing,” said Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Thursday, following the report that U.S. students showed their steepest decline in decades in math and reading scores during the COVID school shutdowns.
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Life expectancy across all groups in the U.S. has fallen 2.7 years from 2019 to 2021, the largest two-year decrease in 100 years, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released Wednesday.
Overall, life expectancy at birth fell to 76.1 years, with life expectancy declines driven primarily by the coronavirus pandemic and unintentional injuries including overdoses, with heart disease, liver disease and suicide representing smaller contributions, the CDC reported. While life expectancy is expected to increase slightly in 2022, it is unlikely to rise to pre-pandemic levels and CDC researchers are still waiting to see how the U.S. fares in an expected winter rise in death rates, according to Reuters.
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Estimates vary widely on how much President Joe Biden’s $10,000-20,000 per borrower cancellation of student loans will cost taxpayers, but a new analysis estimates the significant cost of a less-covered aspect of Biden’s plan.
When Biden announced the debt cancellation, he also announced an extension of student loan repayments “one final time” through Dec. 31 of this year. In March of 2020, then-President Donald Trump first suspended the repayments citing COVID-19. Since then, the suspension has been extended several times. Interest does not accrue while the payments are suspended.
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Of all the creepy things that totalitarian regimes do, perhaps none is more creepy than their habit of encouraging children to inform on their parents to the regime.
Anyone who has read “1984” will remember the pathetic Tom Parsons, who winds up next to Winston Smith in The Ministry of Truth (read: prison) after his young daughter reported that he had muttered “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep.
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The Virginia Department of Education is reminding families qualifying for free meals for students to apply for the program after pandemic-era federal provisions for free meals for all students expired at the end of the 2021-2022 school year, meaning that otherwise qualifying families could face charges for meals starting on the first day of school.
“School meals are important sources of nutrition for students and help reduce food insecurity in the Commonwealth,” Superintendent of Public Education Jillian Balow said in a Monday VDOE newsletter. “I urge all families to apply to determine if they qualify. Filling out an application is simple and takes less than 15 minutes.”
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In the cartoon below, you will see the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) encourage a young female protagonist to report her “Uncle Steve” to Facebook for posting “disinformation”.
DHS’s rationale? “Uncle Steve” posted that “Covid-19 is no worse than the flu”:
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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday called it “a mistake” the state switched to remote learning in schools at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic more than two years ago.
Hochul, a Democrat running to serve a full term in November, made her remarks during a wide-ranging speech at the University of Albany commemorating Women’s Equality Day. That included her calling on the Department of Labor to study the impact the coronavirus had on women in the workforce.
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Oversight Republicans have launched an investigation into how the U.S. Department of Education has handled billions of COVID-19 relief dollars, raising the alarm about the major learning loss experienced by students.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona demanding documents and answers as to why most of the money has reportedly remained unspent.
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A new whistleblower report signed by nine officers across five branches of the military claims the Department of Defense’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate is unlawful.
The report was sent to Congress urging an investigation into what it called illegal and fraudulent activity by the DOD. The memorandum was published by Liberty Council, a nonprofit legal group that in January maintained there was no legal COVID-19 vaccine available despite the U.S. Food and Drug Administration saying there was.
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On Monday, Republican members of the powerful House Oversight Committee announced their intentions to pursue investigations of Dr. Anthony Fauci when they reclaim the majority, even after Fauci announced his plans to step down in December.
As reported by The Daily Caller, Fauci will be leaving his positions at the White House, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in December, after spending 38 years in government. The 81-year-old Fauci said that he will remain active in public health to some degree, and that after leaving government he will enter the “next chapter” of his career.
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Spending on food stamps has increased by $53.5 billion – an 89% increase – in the two pandemic years. By comparison, that’s how much the entire program cost in 2009 during the Great Recession.
Spending on the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program grew 88.5% from $60.3 billion in 2019 to $113.8 billion in 2021. Spending on the SNAP program had previously peaked at $79.8 billion in 2013 before declining for the next six years.
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Enrollment in Catholic schools in the United States has risen for the first time in two decades after teachers’ unions worked with the Biden administration to keep government schools locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The enrollment rise since last year by 3.8 percent, or 62,000 students, in Catholic elementary and secondary schools, is also the largest surge recorded in at least 50 years by the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), the Associated Press reported in February.
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In October 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court stripped Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of the unilateral powers she was using when she declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whitmer had been using a 1945 law – which was prompted by a three-day race riot in Detroit three years earlier – that had no sunset provision in it and didn’t require approval by the state legislature.
In May 2021, Whitmer told a news agency that if she still had that 1945 state-of-emergency law, she would use those powers, but not for anything related to a pandemic.
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The Chief Medical Advisor for President Joe Biden and head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID) who was also the face of the America’s COVID-19 response has announced that he will resign from those positions effective in December.
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to have led the NIAID, an extraordinary institution, for so many years and through so many scientific and public health challenges. I am very proud of our many accomplishments,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said in his resignation announcement. “I have worked with – and learned from – countless talented and dedicated people in my own laboratory, at NIAID, at NIH and beyond. To them I express my abiding respect and gratitude.”
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RICHMOND, Virginia — Governor Glenn Youngkin is directing $397 million in excess funds to be set aside for unspecified tax relief in 2023, as Virginia has $3.2 billion in excess cash — $2 billion in unplanned revenues plus Fiscal Year 2022 spending that was $1.2 billion less than planned.
“Today I formally report to the General Assembly that Virginia ended the fiscal year with a record general fund balance,” Youngkin said at a Friday morning joint meeting of the House of Delegates Finance and Appropriations Committees and the Senate Finance Committee.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Preventions on Wednesday announced changes to the country’s top public health agency, amid criticism about its response to COVID-19, monkeypox and other public health threats.
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Standards of learning tests (SOL) for the 2021-2022 school year show improvement across most subjects from the previous academic year, but the administration is warning that there’s still an achievement gap compared to pre-COVID-19 levels. In a virtual press conference Thursday, Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) officials said that gap shows the impact of virtual learning.
“The research is becoming clearer and clearer: students whose schools were closed for in-person instruction suffered the most. Being in person for school matters,” Superintendent of Public Education Jillian Balow said.
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The average length of stay for COVID-19 patients went up in the first quarter of 2022 according to the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association (VHHA).
“What we saw in the Omicron wave was that those coming into hospitals were staying longer for their COVID hospitalization with an average length of stay of ten-and-a-half days,” VHHA Vice President of Data Analytics, David Vaamonde said during a Monday presentation of hospital and emergency department visit trends.
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White House Senior adviser Anita Dunn has consulted for companies and trade groups that have benefited or stand to benefit from federal funding and is being forced to recuse herself from matters involving them, according to a financial disclosure.
Dunn has consulted through the public affairs firm SKDK during the past two years for the likes of Pfizer, AT&T, Micron and the American Clean Power Association, according to a filing reported on by CNBC Friday. Dunn, who founded the SKDK in 2004, is recused from working on issues related to past clients, a spokesman for the White House told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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After nearly two years of unprecedented lockdowns, mandates, and other restrictions on daily life during the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of thousands of graduating high school students are preparing to head off to college without having learned nearly as much as they should have.
The Associated Press reports that such students are about to enter college significantly farther behind the academic standards of previous years, almost entirely due to the pandemic’s forced transition to “online learning,” a shortage of teachers, and mask and vaccine mandates that disrupted school life for millions of students across the country. Such students risk the possibility of being grossly underprepared for the level of work required by college, and could result in a massive spike in college dropouts in the coming years.
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Attorney General Jason Miyares joined an amicus brief opposing the Biden administration’s ongoing lawsuit over the CDC’s mask mandate for interstate travel. A district court vacated the requirement, but the CDC appealed, and the Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Biden case is now in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
“Mask Mandates across the country have been lifted in virtually every aspect of daily life. For months, Americans have been traveling safely while making their own, autonomous decisions. The CDC mask mandate on public transportation, like air travel, is obsolete and no longer necessary – not to mention a clear example of federal overreach,” Miyares said in a press release.
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Women’s employment increased markedly from June to July, but the total number of employed working-aged men actually dropped in that same time span according to a July jobs report released Friday.
There were 170,000 fewer employed men in July than June, whereas 349,000 more women were employed in July, according to Yahoo Finance. Women’s unemployment dipped to 3.1% in July from 3.3% in June while the same figure for men remained steady at 3.2% from June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ July 2022 Employment Situation report found.
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