Category: Opinion

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said that taking masks off while on an airplane is “not something we should even be considering.”

Fauci was responding to a question from news host Jonathan Karl on a vaccine mandate for domestic air travel.

“We want to make sure people keep their masks on. I think the idea of taking masks off, in my mind, is really not something we should even be considering,” Fauci said.

“And of course, the airline CEOs were suggesting that — you know, that we may not — may no longer need a mask. I hear you loud and clearly, you disagree with that on an — on the airplane,” Karl responded.

During a U.S. Senate panel hearing on Dec. 15, Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly said that masks “don’t add much, if anything” to fight the spread of COVID-19 on airplanes.

Fauci also suggested that a vaccine mandate for domestic air travel could be a motivation for individuals to get vaccinated.

“A vaccine requirement for a person getting on the plane is just another level of getting people to have a mechanism that would spur them to get vaccinated; namely, you can’t get on a plane unless you’re vaccinated, which is just another one of the ways of getting requirements, whatever that might be,” Fauci said.

“So I mean, anything that could get people more vaccinated would be welcome. But with regard to the spread of virus in the country, I mean, I think if you look at wearing a mask and the filtration on planes, things are reasonably safe,” he added.

Fauci previously commented that he doesn’t think there will be a point where masks are unnecessary on airplanes.

“I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good that you want to go that extra step,” Fauci said. “When you have people, you know you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s a well over a five hour flight.”

“Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do and we should be doing it,” he added.

Discussion surrounding Merck’s newly-authorized COVID-19 pill, molnupiravir, has primarily concerned the risk it might pose to pregnant women. But some experts are concerned that it could also lead to the outbreak of a new variant of the virus it’s designed to treat.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization to two antiviral pills to treat COVID-19 this week, one from Pfizer (paxlovid) and another from Merck (molnupiravir). The Pfizer EUA was generally lacking in controversy, but the authorization of molnupiravir was far more concerning.

The FDA’s Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee (ADAC) voted at the end of November to recommend authorization of molnupiravir, but it was by a narrow 13-10 margin. Even the members who voted in favor did so with qualifiers: some said the pill shouldn’t be given to pregnant women, while others were doubtful about its efficacy.

“I don’t think I would want to take this drug, not knowing the effect it could have on my unborn child,” Dr. Roblena Walker, CEO of a public health non-profit EMAGAHA Inc. and ADAC member, said at the time. She voted yes.

Some of the members who voted against recommending authorization were concerned that rather than help solve the pandemic with its 30% efficacy rate, molnupiravir could cause the breakout of a new variant.

Molnupiravir works by triggering mutations in the virus of an infected individual, and those mutations go on to eventually kill the infection, Dr. Peter Weina said. Weina, an infectious disease specialist and director of the Defense Health Agency, is an ADAC member who voted against recommending authorization.

“The drug works by mutating the organism, and this is an organism in which we have a lot of mutations creating problems for us already,” Weina said. “Just like influenza and just like a lot of viruses, there’s a baseline relatively high mutation rate in these viruses. The fact is that most mutations are probably lethal to the organism, but a couple of them are going to end up being beneficial for the organism, and we’ve seen that with the successive different variants that have come out.”

Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College, said he voted no for the same reason: “I voted no. It was an easy vote for me to vote no. … There were more questions than answers. I think the potential for this drug to drive some very challenging variants into the public is a major, major concern.”

“The number needed to treat for this particular drug was 34. What that means in real life is that you have to treat 34 people to get one good outcome. Another way of looking at it means that 33 people who get the drug aren’t necessarily gonna benefit from it,” Weina explained. “And those are 33 out of 34 people that are going to be mutating the virus that’s in them with no potential benefit.”

“100% of the people that are getting the organism, their viruses are mutating. That’s how the drug works and it ends up killing the virus,” he continued. “But the problem of course is that we don’t know how many of those viruses may potentially get a mutation that causes yet another variant out there. Maybe a variant our vaccines have absolutely no efficacy against. So I think the potential risk out there is quite high.”

Hildreth said the odds of a new variant mutating from molnupiravir use might be low, however, the potential downside is high. “Even if the probability is very low, 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000, that this drug would induce an escape mutant for which the vaccines we have do not cover, that would be catastrophic for the whole world,” he said.

The FDA’s own scientists aren’t as concerned though, and ultimately the agency decided after nearly a month of review to grant the pill its EUA. Patrick Harrington, the FDA’s senior virology reviewer, seemingly acknowledged the theoretical risk when addressing ADAC but downplayed it: “For molnupiravir to affect Sars-CoV-2 evolution beyond a treated individual, the variants would also have to be transmissible, and at this time we do not know if this is possible to a significant degree.”

Ten firefighters resigned from an Illinois fire department after a man who had once been convicted of arson was named the department’s acting chief.

Without any explanation Jerame Simmons, the fire department’s assistant chief replaced John Rosenkranz as chief on Monday. The department’s board of trustees said “a change in the Fire Department’s leadership is needed” in a statement after a meeting Monday.

Simmons pleaded guilty to arson in 1999 after setting fire to the ceiling tiles in his high school’s basement and starting a fire in an abandoned house. He was 18-years old at that time and was sentenced to four years of probation, though Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker later pardoned him.

Eight of the volunteers who quit sent a letter to the board of trustees stating they were leaving their positions “with regret and sorrow.” There were thirteen total firefighters at the department.

“The town remembers the school being set on fire, the town remembers the house set on fire [where] we had firefighters fall and be injured,” Laura Rosenkranz, the department’s captain, and the former chief’s wife, said. She submitted her resignation as well.

Simmons’s father was the mayor of the town at the time of his sentencing. The former mayor is now the director of the county emergency management agency.

“These people feel like they have absolutely no other option,” the former chief said. Adding that the board had held an “unusual” meeting in August where Simmons was named the department’s acting assistant chief.

“It’s not important that I’m the chief or not the chief,” he said. “It’s about … making sure everything’s taken care of.”

Outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said on Sunday that he’s “sorry” the Wuhan lab-leak theory has become such a “huge distraction” for the country, even though there is “no evidence” to support it.

After more than a decade on the job, Collins dodged questions about his attempt to discredit the lab-leak theory at the beginning of the pandemic, reiterating that the most likely explanation is that the virus spread through animal-to-human transmission.

“I’m really sorry that the lab leak has become such a distraction for so many people because frankly, we still don’t know,” Collins said.

“There is no evidence really to say. Most of the scientific community, myself included, think that is a possibility, but far more likely, this was a natural way in which a virus left a bat, maybe traveled through some other species and got to humans.”

In October of this year, Collins said that claims about the agency’s involvement in gain-of-function research and the Wuhan Institute of Virology had “absolutely” nothing to do with his resignation.

Regardless there are emails between Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci suggesting a deliberate effort to downplay theories that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab and, whether deliberately or, their funding had any involvement.

“We won’t know unless China decides to open up on this which they have not done, and shame on them for that,” Collins said, “this has been a huge distraction” for the scientific community.

“We in this country have somehow gotten all fractured into a hyperpolarized politicized view that never should have been mixed with public health,” Collins said. “It has been ruinous and history will judge harshly those people who have continued to defocus the effort and focus on conspiracies and things that are demonstrably false. Shame on all of us that we’ve gotten into this kind of pickle.”

Friday the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released an email where Collins expressed deep concerns about the herd immunity strategy being advocated by “fringe epidemiologists,” and called for “a quick and devastating published takedown” of the three experts promoting the herd immunity strategy known as “The Great Barrington Declaration.”

Collins told Baier that he is “not going to apologize,” for his words, arguing that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.”

“I did write that, and I will stand by that,” Collins said. “Basically, these fringe epidemiologists who really did not have the credentials to be making such a grand sweeping statement were saying just let the virus run through the population and eventually then everybody would have had it and everything will be okay.”

The United States recently surpassed 50 million COVID-19 cases and 800,000 deaths since the onset of the pandemic. Even facing those numbers, Collins maintained that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.”

“So I’m sorry I was opposed to that, I still am, and I’m not going to apologize for it,” he said.

As for the new omicron variant, Collins said the U.S. should brace for a “world of trouble” the next couple of months, based on its higher transmissibility than the previous strains, which “pale by comparison.”

Baier pointed to recent data out of South Africa that could point to milder symptoms and fewer hospitalizations from omicron.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was in the hot seat again on Tuesday when she acknowledged that crime rates have gone up in the past year, but could not come up with an answer for the causes.

“Following up on something you said yesterday when you say that we’ve seen an increase in crime over the course of the pandemic there is a range of reasons for that. Would you consider the reasons in the range, prosecutors cutting people who are accused of many criminal offenses loose too quickly?” Press Reporter Peter Doocy asked.

“Again, I am not, as I wasn’t yesterday, going to give an assessment for every motivation or every reason for crime in different communities across the country. What I have noted, which you see in data, is that there has been an increase in crime since the start of the pandemic,” Psaki replied. “I will let others assess what the reason for that increase in crime is.”

Doocy questioned the administration’s action in relation to the “smash-and-grab robberies” that are being organized on social media platforms.

“We are monitoring, of course, these thefts very closely as we’ve talked about a bit in here,” she continued. “The videos and reports we’re seeing are very troubling. Our state and local law enforcement partners have primary jurisdiction over break-ins and robberies of this kind, but I can say we’re aggressively using every resource at our disposal.”

Psaki said she would defer to law enforcement, the FBI, and other officials to assess how the monitoring of crime is being organized.

Los Angeles authorities announced the arrests of fourteen people linked to 11 smash-and-grab robberies committed in mid-November, who had been released because of the city’s crime reform. Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti came out in support of a no-bail policy for select defendants.

Doocy pressed Psaki on the stance the White House has taken in response to the rise in crime throughout major U.S. cities and whether prosecutors are “too soft” on crime. She answered by saying that the administration has proposed additional funding for police departments and has been in communication with law enforcement in cities with high surges in crime.

Doocy pressed Psaki on whether bail reform is “good governing,” citing the release of Craig Tamanaha, a pick-pocketer with over 30 arrests.

Tamanaha set fire to the Fox News Christmas Tree in New York City earlier this month. He was released from prison on no bail due to New York’s policy which states that a judge can only set bail if the suspect is charged with at least a third-degree felony arson.

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon passed Proposition 47, which reduced felonies to misdemeanors despite the county’s 46% increase in homicide and 56% rise in car thefts.

Former Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced to a crowd attending a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) conference Sunday that she absolutely would not get vaccinated against COVID-19.

“It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot. I will not do it,” she said to a cheering crowd in Phoenix, Arizona. “I will not do it and they better not touch my kids, either.”

TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk questioned Palin about the people at risk of losing their jobs and education for defying vaccine mandates. Palin answered that “enough is enough” and people need to “stiffen their spines” against the government and those mandating the shot.

“I think if enough of us rise up and say ‘no, enough is enough,’ there are more of us than there are of them,” Palin said. “So for us to be hesitant, and for us to kinda wait and let somebody else take this on and stand up and say ‘enough is enough.’”

“You all need to look around and realize that if you stiffen your spine and take those positions that you know are right, especially when it comes to government telling us what we have to inject into our own bodies,” she continued. “Realize that those around you as you stiffen your spine, their spines too, will stiffen.”

Palin as well as members of her family tested positive for COVID-19 in April. She cautioned that any person can contract the virus and should take proper precautions, including wearing masks indoors.

“As confident as I’d like to be about my own health, and despite my joking that I’m blessed to constantly breathe in the most sterile air, my case is perhaps one that proves anyone can catch this,” she said. “One of my daughters awoke to having lost her taste and smell [and] immediately had a positive test, then was quarantined in isolation.”

In the past year, tensions have grown among government officials, businesses, and schools over vaccine mandates throughout the U.S. In early November, Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced legislation intended to stop schools from mandating the vaccine for children after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for students ages 5-11.

Republican Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy slammed President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate on companies employing 100 or more individuals by saying the administration treats Americans like “anti-science morons.” However, he called the vaccine a “Godsend” and said that he believes the president should urge people to get the shot.

Social media is currently blowing up with calls for truckers to boycott Colorado after a former trucker received 110 years in prison for a 2019 crash that killed four people. Many people feel the sentence was much too severe.

Rogel Lazaro Aguilera Mederos, 25, was convicted of vehicular homicide by a Jefferson County jury on Oct. 15 in connection with the April 2019 crash on Interstate 70 west of Denver.

Aguilera Mederos wept openly during sentencing on Dec. 13. He stated that he was unable to sleep and that he thought about the victims “all the time.” Mederos also said he was not a criminal.

Aguilera Mederos testified that the brakes on his semitrailer failed before he crashed into vehicles that had slowed down due to another wreck in the Denver suburb of Lakewood.

Prosecutors argued he could have used one of several runaway ramps as his truck barreled down from the mountains. The chain-reaction wreck ruptured gas tanks, causing flames that consumed several vehicles and melted parts of the highway just after it descends from the mountains west of Denver.

In response to the impending boycott, which has taken on the hashtag #NoTrucksToColorado, the Colorado Motor Carriers issued the following statement on Twitter: “Feel for driver. #NoTrucksToColorado has some info that is not accurate. Not mech. failure – brakes gave way due to inexper. driver traveling in mtns above posted speeds/ not gearing down — overheated brakes gave way. He knew of hot brakes yet bypassed runaway truck ramp.”

Twitter user @Not_YouFatJesus said in support of Aguilera Mederos: “It makes me happy to see truckers standing up for the 26 year old Latino who got 110 years. That’s a ridiculous sentence for what was obviously an accident. Meanwhile you have privileged yt boys getting no jail time for pre-planned murders #NoTrucksToColorado”

Twitter user @AOrtega_80 said that he and his brother “have decided that we (Brown Eagle LLC) have joined the protest and are not getting any loads out of or to Colorado until Rogel gets justice cause 110 years is ridiculous. The company should be held accountable!”

There are many truckers who are saying the boycott is unnecessary.

“I suggest truckers and new truckers take every load available going to and from Colorado,” Twitter user @JamesonTaj wrote. “There’s a strike of #notruckstocolorado and it’s the perfect time to make extra money for the holidays. Let them protest for their criminal and let us make money #colorado #rogelaguilera”

A petition to free Aguilera Mederos has appeared on the website change.org.

Posted by Heather Gilbee, the petition reads: “We all know of the crash that happened on I-70 in Denver, Colorado. Most of us have heard facts in the case. Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, 23 has nothing on his driving record, or on his criminal history. He had complied with every single request by the Jefferson County courts, and investigators on the case. He’s passed all of the drug and alcohol tests that were given including a chemical test.

“This accident was not intentional, nor was it a criminal act on the driver’s part. No one but the trucking company he is/was employed by should be held accountable for this accident. No, we are not trying to make it seem any less of a tragic accident than it is because yes, lives were lost. We are trying to hold the person who needs to be held responsible, responsible. The trucking company has had several inspections since 2017, with several mechanical violations.

“There are many things Rogel could have done to avoid the courts, but he took responsibility showed up, and severely apologized to the victim’s families. Some of the families even offered Forgiveness. Rogel is not a criminal, the company he was working for knew the federal laws that go into truck driving but they failed to follow those laws. Rogel has said several times that he wishes he had the courage to crash and take his own life that day, this tragic accident wasn’t done with Intent, it wasn’t a criminal act, it was an accident. Since he has been sentenced, I have changed this to granting Rogel clemency or commutation-as time served.”

So far, more than 2.7 million people have signed the petition.

Tom Holland, star of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” made good on a promise he’d made to a young fan who was attacked by a dog while saving his sister.

Holland delivered on a promise he had made in July of 2020 to Bridger Walker, who was 6-years-old at the time, for heroically saving his 4-year-old sister in a dog attack. The Spiderman star offered the brave young boy an invitation to visit the “Spider-man: No Way Home” set.

The Cheyenne, Wyoming, siblings were playing outside when a German shepherd bolted toward the sister, but Walker leaped into action to save his sister. He had to be rushed to the hospital, where he underwent a two-hour surgery that required more than 90 stitches.

Marvel stars, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, and Tom Holland, contacted the family privately while publicly praising Walker’s heroic efforts. Holland went a step further and offered to bring Bridger to the “Spider-man: No Way Home” set.

“When we first arrived on set, I was a little apprehensive that once the curtain was pulled back that the magic of the movies would be lost for the kids,” Bridger’s father Robert Walker wrote on Instagram. “The opposite was true!”

“I personally think it is because the cast and crew are good, kind, and passionate people. Individuals who heard about a little boy’s injury, who wanted to make it right,” he added.

Walker added that Bridger got to “web swing with his hero” and thanked Holland, his co-star Zendaya and the rest of the cast and crew who were “willing to stop a very busy day of shooting to make my little boy smile.”

Brigitte Macron, the French first lady, is taking legal action in response to a conspiracy theory going around on the internet alleging that she is a transgender woman.

The rumors started on a right-wing website in September and have been shared by conspiracy theorists, claiming she was born male under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux. The moniker, which includes her maiden name, has trended on social media with tens of thousands of comments.

“She has decided to initiate proceedings, it is in progress,” the first lady’s lawyer, Jean Ennochi, said.

The accusations originated in a journal written by a woman named Natacha Rey, then later spread after being discussed on a YouTube broadcast featuring anti-vaxxers, skeptics of COVID-19, and right-wing activists.

“This ability of the most marginal and most toxic fringe to take space in the public debate is saddening,” Tristan Mendès France, a professor at Paris Diderot University who specializes in right-wing media, commented.

Adding the rumors were a part of a “radical conspiracy theory, be it American or French, that there is a degeneration of our elites and therefore a sexual degeneration.”

The 68-year-old1st lady is 24 years older than her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, who is expected to run for a second term in the French presidential election in April. He would face competition from right-wing television personality Eric Zemmour.

In a recent interview actor and director, James Franco admitted that he had engaged in sexual misconduct, saying that he had sex with some of his students.

In 2018, five women came forward and accused Franco of “inappropriate or sexually exploitative behavior.” Franco said he hesitated to address the allegations in 2018 because “it didn’t seem like the right time to say anything.”

“Look, I’ll admit I did sleep with students. I didn’t sleep with anybody in [my ‘Sex Scenes’ class], but, over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students and that was wrong,” Franco insisted.

“But like I said, I, it’s not why I started the school and I, I didn’t, I wasn’t the person that selected the people to be in the class. So it wasn’t a master plan on my part. But yes, there were certain instances where, you know what I was in a consensual thing with, with a student and I shouldn’t have been.”

“There’s a writer, Damon Young, and he talked about, you know, when something like this happens like the natural human instinct is to just make it stop. You just want to get out in front of it and do whatever you have to do, apologize, you know get it done, but what that doesn’t do is allow you to do the work and look at what was underneath,” Franco said.

He continued that there’s “probably an iceberg underneath of behavior, patterning, underneath that isn’t just going to be solved,” saying that he’s been “doing a lot of work” on himself.

Franco shared that he’d been in “recovery” for addiction and was using that to face and work on other issues in his life. In being open about his struggles with alcoholism, Franco said he used success, attention, and later sex to fill the void that had come with his sobriety.
Describing sex as a “powerful drug,” Franco noted how this form of addiction made him “completely blind to power dynamics and to people’s feelings.”

“The behavior spun out to a point where I was hurting everybody,” Franco said.

Franco’s Golden Globes win in 2018 was the catalyst for his accusers to come forward. The allegations even led Vanity Fair to remove him from the cover of their Hollywood issue.

Franco shared that he has been dating actress Isabel Pakzad for the last four years.