Free Republic

It was four years ago, in March 2020, that health officials declared COVID-19 a pandemic and America began shutting down schools, closing small businesses, restricting gatherings and travel, and other lockdown measures to “slow the spread” of the virus. To mark that grim anniversary, a group of medical and policy experts released a report, called “COVID Lessons Learned,” which assesses the government’s response to the pandemic. According to the report, that response included a few notable successes, along with a litany of failures that have taken a severe toll on the population. During the pandemic, many governments across the globe...

The US government’s free at-home Covid-19 test program will be suspended Friday, according to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. Since November, residential households in the US have been able to submit an order through Covidtests.gov for four individual rapid antigen tests. All orders placed on or before Friday will be fulfilled, according to ASPR, an operating division of the US Department of Health and Human Services. “ASPR has delivered over 1.8 billion free COVID-19 tests to the American people through COVIDTests.gov and direct distribution pathways and will continue distributing millions of tests per week to long-term care facilities,...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday mothballed its longstanding COVID isolation guidance, announcing that people no longer need to isolate for five days after catching the coronavirus. Instead, per the CDC, they should stay home if they feel sick but can leave home and resume normal activities as soon as their symptoms are getting better and its been a day since they had a fever (without the help of fever-reducing medication). That means that the CDC is now both streamlining and simplifying its recommendations and advising people to treat their COVID infections like they would the flu...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) quietly updated its federal COVID-19 guidelines to recommend treating the virus similarly to the flu, vindicating years of dissident opinion and undermining the original justification for drastically upending Americans’ lives in its name. Declaring that COVID is “no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses,” the new guidance says COVID’s threat is now “more similar to that of other common respiratory viruses,” justifying the agency’s decision to issue a general “Respiratory Virus Guidance, rather than additional virus-specific guidance.” It...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to drop its five-day Covid isolation guideline, reports suggest — nearly four years after the pandemic began. Under new guidelines, the health agency will instead urge people who test positive for the virus to end isolation based on their symptoms. Those whose symptoms are mild and improving will no longer be urged to stay away from work and school, but those who have a fever or cough in the past 24 hours should stay away from others. The new recommendation will tell people they should only consider themselves to be OK...

The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the argument that refusing to wear face masks at school board meetings during the COVID-19 outbreak constitutes protected speech under the First Amendment. The court ruled on cases involving individuals who claimed retaliation by school boards for not wearing masks at public meetings. The court emphasized that disobeying a masking requirement does not fall under protected speech, comparing it to other forms of non-compliance with the law. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, “A question shadowing suits such as these is whether there is a First Amendment right to refuse to wear...

A new report is highlighting how federal COVID funds were used in Washington state to give $1,000 checks to illegal immigrants who were ineligible to receive federal economic impact payments during the pandemic due to their immigration status. The report, by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), points to money administered by the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF), which was created by the American Rescue Plan Act and was intended to help state and local governments with their response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Washington state received $4.4 billion in funding overall from that program. The...

Doctors have released a damning new report on America’s “failures” during the COVID pandemic, revealing that keeping schools closed for longer than necessary and forcing people to mask outside led the country to experience “eye-wateringly high” death rates compared to other first-world nations. Duke University professor Gavin Yamey and Drexel University professor Ana Roux said the pandemic “failures began at the top” with poor communication from the federal government, which demonstrated a “surprising inability to generate reliable information, communicate it in a timely and consistent manner and translate it into sound policy.”

MADRID, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Spain's government proposed a nationwide mandate for people to wear masks in hospitals and health clinics on Monday, and Italy said respiratory illness infection rates had hit a record, as flu and COVID spread across Europe. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recommended that people on the continent stay home if they feel sick, and consider wearing masks in crowds or healthcare settings, with flu spreading as it typically does this time of year but hitting some countries harder than others. It said Europeans should follow national guidelines on vaccinating vulnerable groups. Flu...

A new Covid variant that is behind a resurgence in hospital admissions may be more deadly than previously thought, research suggests. BA.2.86 — or 'Pirola' — is a mutation on the Omicron BA.2 subvariant and is the ancestor of the currently dominant JN.1, which is responsible for more than three in five Covid cases as of January 6. Both strains have around 60 more spike protein mutations than the original coronavirus and over 30 more than other Omicron variants such as BA.2 and XBB.1.5.

House Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic are questioning Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday and Tuesday in closed-door sessions; the focus, according to committee chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), is “pandemic-era” failures. Members of the committee are expected to question Fauci about many failures surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, including Fauci’s participation in casting doubt on the theory that the coronavirus came from a lab leak:

Scientists at the center of the “lab leak” controversy visited Anthony Fauci’s institute at the National Institutes of Health in 2017 to discuss their research — just months before NIH lifted a pause on high-risk virology, and two years before a novel coronavirus emerged near their lab in Wuhan.Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Shi Zhengli passed a security screening to visit National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers in June 2017, where she gave a presentation about novel coronaviruses, emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know show.Shi is known internationally as the “Bat Lady” for her work with...

Mask mandates are back in Big Apple hospitals and other health facilities as cases of COVID and the flu have jumped in recent weeks, the city’s health department confirmed Wednesday. The requirement applies to all 11 hospitals across the five boroughs under the umbrella of New York City’s Health and Hospitals and went into effect just after Christmas. “As we’ve seen an increase in COVID, flu, and RSV, our priority is to protect our patients, staff, and the community,” a NYCH+H spokesperson told The Post Wednesday. “This applies to clinical settings such as our hospitals, community health centers, and nursing...

(NEXSTAR) — With respiratory illness spiking across the country, there’s a good chance you’re sick to start the new year. Maybe you have the symptoms of COVID-19, prompting you to take a test or two that you received for free from the federal government in 2023. It’s also possible you’re testing negative. While there is a relatively obvious reason why your test is negative (more on that in a moment), there is another less obvious possibility you may be overlooking.

Friday, during an appearance on FBN’s “Mornings with Maria,” Rep. Jerry Carl (R-AL) likened the trend of states removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to efforts in 2020 that changed election law and procedures in the name of COVID mitigation.Once again, liberal activists are imposing their Far Left agenda on the American people. The Constitution is clear, and the voters should be able to freely choose their candidate without this ridiculous election interference.https://t.co/NRgjhyHHay— Jerry Carl (@CarlForAlabama) December 29, 2023“You know, I watched that yesterday, and I made a small...

The Washington Post famously ran a piece in 2020 headlined, "Tom Cotton Keeps Repeating a Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory That Was Already Debunked." That conspiracy theory was that COVID escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China that was performing gain-of-function research. Fifteen months later, the Post stealth-edited its headline to read, "Tom Cotton Keeps Repeating a Coronavirus Fringe Theory That Scientists Have Disputed."

The CDC has struggled to measure and decide who is fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Most recently, it includes people who have received the 2023/2024 updates from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or Novavax. Dosage rules vary by age. With this as their yardstick, 33% of Americans qualify as vaccinated as of December 10, the latest period for which data are available. Arizona has a rate that is only about half of that. Medical experts have become alarmed that a new variant has spread quickly in the US. The JN. 1 Omnicro sub-variant accounts for over 40% of cases. The WHO describes it as...

Look for flu and COVID-19 infections to ramp up in the coming weeks, U.S. health officials say, with increases fueled by holiday gatherings, too many unvaccinated people and a new version of the coronavirus that may be spreading more easily. High levels of flu-like illnesses were reported last week in 17 states — up from 14 the week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. “Folks are traveling a lot more this season. They want to see their families,” said the CDC's Dr. Manisha Patel. "And all of that sort of adds to the mix” in the...

President Joe Biden's former Covid advisor has admitted the pandemic may have been borne out of a laboratory leak in Wuhan. Speaking at a New York City health conference this week, Dr Raj Panjabi, former Special Assistant to the President, described the lab leak theory as 'plausible' and called on Governments around the world to 'do more to keep labs safe.’ Biden called former President Donald Trump 'nakedly xenophobic’ in May 2020, for suggesting Covid was the result of Chinese experiments gone wrong.

More than a quarter of people injected with mRNA Covid jabs suffered an unintended immune response created by a glitch in the way the vaccine was read by the body, a study has found.