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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration said Thursday that the COVID-19 public health emergency will continue through Jan. 11 as officials brace for a spike in cases this winter. The decision comes as the pandemic has faded from the forefront of many people’s minds. Daily deaths and infections are dropping and people — many of them maskless — are returning to schools, work and grocery stores as normal. The public health emergency, first declared in January 2020 and renewed every 90 days since, has dramatically changed how health services are delivered. The declaration enabled the emergency authorization of COVID vaccines,...

Update: The January 6 Committee on Thursday unanimously voted to subpoena Trump.

As the November midterm election draws near, the focus is on voting protocols and tools, especially the voting machines themselves. After the 2020 election, many irregularities in voting were documented across the country, some due to mail-in voting, some due to voting rosters, some due to poll workers, and some due to machines that were somehow hacked or compromised in some way. GPB News reports: “Sensitive voting system passwords posted online. copies of confidential voting software are available for download. Ballot counting machines inspected by people not supposed to have access. The list of suspected security breaches at local election...

In 1993, the Buffalo Bills were down 32 points to the Houston Oilers in the third quarter of an NFL playoff game. In one of the most astounding comebacks in sports history, the Bills defeated the Oilers by a score of 41-38. Welcome, political fans, to the final quarter of the 2022 midterm House elections. Over the past several weeks, the punditry has morphed from digging the Democrats’ graves to hyping expectations of their over-performing. Going into the summer, some forecasts had Democrats losing as many three-dozen seats. Coming out of summer, David Wasserman, the unusually prescient analyst from the...

Democrats are entering the homestretch before November’s election in better shape than earlier this year, boosted by gains among independent voters, improved views of President Biden and higher voting enthusiasm among abortion-rights supporters, a Wall Street Journal poll shows.

he School District of Philadelphia is requiring all students and staff to wear masks for the first 10 days of the upcoming school year, officials announced on Friday. After that, everyone is allowed to go mask-optional, regardless of COVID-19 vaccination status, unless the community transmission level is high. “For the first 10 days of the new school year—from Aug. 29 through Sept. 9—all students and staff will be required to wear masks while in school, regardless of the COVID-19 Community Level,” according to an announcement on the district’s website. “This is an extra precaution for everyone’s health and well-being since...

Politico is reporting on the likelihood that Joe Biden is preparing to extend the national COVID-19 state of emergency through the 2022 midterm elections. The debate, as outlined in just about every media narrative surrounding renewals of a national COVID emergency, is obtusely presented as if the primary political concern is public health. Again, everyone must pretend not to know the true motive of the “emergency” is extending unilateral executive power and all of the control mechanisms therein. One mechanism would include the use of ‘Mail-in election ballots‘, which has absolutely nothing to do with public health. The article appears...

Dr. Anthony Fauci has once again sounded the warning bell over COVID-19, saying in an interview on Tuesday that those who are not up to date on vaccines will “get into trouble” this fall and winter. “If they don’t get vaccinated or they don’t get boosted, they’re going to get into trouble,” Fauci told Los Angeles radio station KNX-AM. A large part of the U.S. population is not up to date on the COVID-19 vaccines.

Tucker Carlson has been accused of homophobia and being cruel after joking about changing the name of monkeypox. On his Thursday night show, the Fox News host joked about the decision to change the name of the disease as cases continue to be concentrated among the gay community. In early June, a group of scientists, many based in Africa, issued a position paper calling for a name change for the disease to avoid the negative impact it was having on people from different communities. "We propose a novel classification of MPXV (Monkeypox Virus) that is non-discriminatory and non-stigmatizing and aligned...

The Climate Clock, an online tool and algorithm designed to calculate humanity's deadline for reducing global warming, fell below seven years Friday. The clock, which was developed in 2020 to give a sense of urgency to world leaders, fell from seven years to six years and 364 days, according to algorithm. The tool shows how much time is left to limit global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. "The clock is a portable scientific instrument," Climate Clock co-founder Andrew Boyd told Fox News Digital. "It reduces a lot of complexity into a simple, clear message and mission:...

@JStein_WaPo Scoop: White House weighs declaring national climate emergency as soon as this week, per sources, as collapse of talks w/ Manchin leads admin to explore raft of unilateral options

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the window to control the spread of the monkeypox virus in the United States may be closed. Partial transcript as follows: MARGARET: Give us a sense of the scale of this because the CDC numbers are out. They say they’re only eight women within that. No children. You’re saying this is a pandemic? That’s not a word the administration is using yet, what level of emergency are we at? GOTTLIEB: Yeah look, and I think they’re going to be reluctant to...

wo officials at one of the largest hospital systems in Los Angeles and Southern California dismissed government officials’ statements about another wave of COVID-19 hitting the region and the United States as “media hype.” Los Angeles County health director Barbara Ferrer last week said that her county is now seeing a “high” level of COVID-19 transmission, suggesting that indoor mask mandates might be reimposed. But in a recent news conference on July 13, Brad Spellberg, the chief medical officer of Los Angeles County and University of Southern California Medical Center, and epidemiologist Paul Holtom, said that there have been no...

CNN — U.S. health officials have been in active discussions with the Food and Drug Administration on whether the agency will authorize a second booster vaccine for Americans under 50 years old, the nation's top infectious disease expert shared Saturday. "Hopefully we'll get an answer reasonably soon," Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN's Laura Coates. Advertisement Second boosters have been authorized for U.S. adults 50 and up, as well as certain people with weakened immune systems, since March. But for anyone under the age of 50, only one booster is authorized. Fauci's comments come amid a worrisome time in the pandemic...

Dr. Ashish Jha, President Biden's COVID-19 coordinator, voiced support on Sunday for Los Angeles County preparing to bring back its mask mandate, as the area has seen a surge in coronavirus cases driven by the BA.5 variant of the omicron strain. Los Angeles is on pace to bring back its universal indoor mask mandate on July 29, unless the county drops below the CDC's "high" transmission threshold by that point. Jha was asked about Los Angeles' move to bring back its mask mandate during his appearance on ABC's "This Week." "My view on this has been very clear, which is...

ATLANTA (AP) — The expanded use of drop boxes for mailed ballots during the 2020 election did not lead to any widespread problems, according to an Associated Press survey of state election officials across the U.S. that revealed no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft that could have affected the results. Drop boxes also are a focal point of the film “2,000 Mules,” which used a flawed analysis of cellphone location data and ballot drop box surveillance footage to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election. In response to the legislation and conspiracy theories surrounding drop boxes,...

As the all-important midterm elections of 2022 get closer, it’s more pressing than ever for the GOP to prepare for whatever shenanigans-laden curveballs the Dems are sure to throw at them. One would hope that the Republicans are finally aware that it’s always a matter of “when” and not “if” the Democrats will try to underhandedly game an election, especially after the debacle of 2020. During the Obama years, I used to say that any GOP candidate had to make sure that he or she was “outside the margin of ACORN.” I’ve updated that to “outside the margin of magic...

ATLANTA - Republican Herschel Walker’s $6.2 million in fundraising looked impressive when unveiled Wednesday, until Democrat Raphael Warnock rolled out his $17.2 million total a half-hour later. The dueling Senate campaign numbers underlined two truths. Georgia is again going to be one of the most expensive races to run for office in 2022, and Democrats are building a strong fundraising advantage. Like Warnock, Democrat Stacey Abrams heavily outraised incumbent Republican Brian Kemp in the race for governor, collecting almost $50 million compared to the $31 million Kemp has brought in over a longer period. Abrams and Warnock plan to run...

Fauci appeared on MSNBC on Tuesday to recommend viewers continue to mask up indoors and get their second booster shot to combat the spread of the BA.5 variant, though he admitted it would be a "hard sell" for the American people.

Los Angeles County reached a “high” level of COVID-19 infections on Thursday, according to public health officials, meaning a mask mandate could be imposed in two weeks as the highly transmissible Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 make waves across the country. The health department bases its decision on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s three-tier criteria of community high, medium or low levels of COVID-19 rates. L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer expressed concern to reporters Thursday about the new infections, saying “we have a ton of transmission right now,” and stressed her position on masking up.