Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Police department employees claim ‘hostile work environment’ for the unvaccinated and say mandate violates civil rights
Los Angeles police department (LAPD) employees have sued over requirements they get vaccinated for Covid-19, alleging that the department has created a “hostile work environment” for the unvaccinated and that the mandate violates employees’ privacy and civil rights.
The suit is one of several aggressive challenges to vaccine mandates by police unions and officers across California, some of whom have threatened mass resignations in response to new rules. It comes as staff at law enforcement agencies remain unvaccinated at disproportionately high rates.
• Lewis county hospital to suspend service next week
• Covid-19 vaccines compulsory for all New York health workers
A hospital in upstate New York will at least temporarily stop delivering babies later this month, after too many employees resigned over a Covid-19 vaccination mandate.
“We are unable to safely staff the service after 24 September,” Gerald Cayer, chief executive of the Lewis County Health System, told reporters.
Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff have written to complain about search algorithms that appear to spread misinformation
American senator Elizabeth Warren has accused Amazon of “peddling misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines and treatments” through its search and bestseller algorithms, after the online retail giant pushed a book by an author the New York Times called “the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online”.
Searching for Covid-19 on the site gives the top result as Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins’s The Truth About Covid-19, a title that claims to reveal how the “effectiveness of the vaccines has been wildly exaggerated”, how the virus was lab-engineered in Wuhan, and how “safe, simple, and inexpensive treatment and prevention for Covid-19 have been censored and suppressed to create a clear path for vaccine acceptance”.
Asa Hutchinson calls directive ‘unprecedented assumption of federal mandate authority’ as other governors threaten to sue
The political sparring match over Joe Biden’s new vaccine mandate continued on Sunday with one Republican governor blasting the measure as “counterproductive” and the White House insisting it was necessary to end the coronavirus pandemic.
The Liverpool site will work with other international centres to research the threat of emerging disruptive diseases
A new scientific institute which aims to prevent future pandemics may have been able to save thousands of lives by accelerating vaccine development had it existed before December 2019, its researchers believe.
Liverpool’s new Pandemic Institute will include a new human challenge facility, where volunteers will test new vaccines and treatments under controlled conditions.
Police in Greece’s second city Thessaloniki fired tear gas at anti-vaccination protesters ahead of a keynote economic speech by prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
The police used tear gas and a water cannon to keep around 1,000 protesters away from the venue of the speech.
Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim.
Their analysis of medical data suggests that boys aged 12 to 15, with no underlying medical conditions, are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in hospital with Covid over a four-month period.
Scientists would make swifter progress in solving the world’s problems if they learned to put their egos aside and collaborate better, according to the leading researcher behind the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine.
Prof Katalin Karikó, the senior vice-president for RNA protein replacement therapies at BioNTech in Germany, endured decades of scepticism over her work and was demoted and finally kicked out of her lab while developing the technology that made the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines possible.
Pfizer has been accused of holding Brazil “to ransom” over demands to shield itself from possible vaccine side-effect lawsuits in its contract to supply the country with 100m Covid jabs.
In its $1bn (£700m) deal with Pfizer Export BV, signed in March, despite its prior complaints, the Brazilian government agreed that “a liability waiver be signed for any possible side-effects of the vaccine, exempting Pfizer from any civil liability for serious side-effects arising from the use of the vaccine, indefinitely”.
We know that under the current legislative situation, there’s nothing preventing political parties like the United Australia Party from sending out those text messages, and people cannot unsubscribe from them.
The carriage of messages is generally a commercial matter for telecommunications providers, except in circumstances where there may be offences against the laws of the commonwealth or states or territories.
Both the Telecommunications Act 1997 and Spam Act 2003 contain provisions about implied freedom of political communications. These provisions set out that the acts or parts of them do not apply to the extent they would infringe on any constitutional doctrine of implied freedom of political communication.
There’s a press conference with the PM at 1.40pm AEST.
Daily cases in New Zealand’s coronavirus outbreak have continued to fall, with just 13 new infections recorded on Thursday, the sixth day in a row that numbers have been below 21. The downward trend is an encouraging sign the tough lockdown measures are working and that the country is making progress towards stamping out the virus.
It came as the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced the government had secured another 250,000 Pfizer vaccines from Spain to enable the vaccine rollout to continue at pace.
Data suggesting 20.3% of people are unwilling or unsure on getting jab prompts call for new strategies to reach nation’s wary
Australians must be prepared to see the Covid vaccination uptake curve start to flatten in coming months, a leading vaccine communication expert has warned, due to the rate of hesitancy.
But she is calling for health policy to reach this group in order to stop their lives becoming too difficult or to drive them away from healthcare.
Victoria Police in Australia say future organised large gatherings will not be tolerated, and police will act on intelligence to stop them, after dozens of worshippers gathered near a synagogue in Melbourne’s south east earlier this week, in breach of Covid-19 lockdown rules.
Six people so far have been fined $5452 each for the illegal gathering in Ripponlea on Tuesday morning, held to mark the start of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah.
One of the other topics that has come up during the UK’s morning media round is the issue of vaccinations for 12- to 15-year-olds, and whether they should be able to overrule their parents and get the jab if they want it. Earlier on Sky News UK health secretary Sajid Javid said:
I think we should follow the same rules that we’ve had in this country, under the successive governments, for decades, which is that you first would try to seek the consent of parents. If there’s a difference of opinion between the child and the parent, then we have specialists that work in this area, the school’s vaccination service, they would usually sit down with the parent and the child and try to reach some kind of consensus. If ultimately that doesn’t work, as long as we believe that the child is competent enough to make this decision, then the child will will prevail.
We have a lot of case law about the competence of young people to make decisions on their own. Certainly, in respect of procedure which is of benefit to them. I think we should err on the side of giving young people the opportunity to make decisions.
Firms accused of ‘rounding up workers like animals’ for compulsory vaccination as country acts to stop spread of virus
Thousands of workers in Zimbabwe have been told they will face the sack if they refuse to be vaccinated with one of the Covid-19 jabs, according to the country’s biggest worker’s union.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), an amalgamation of 35 labour unions representing 189,000 people, has accused employers of infringing workers’ rights, saying there is no law providing for compulsory vaccinations. It has taken the government and six companies to court for ordering employees to have the vaccine, arguing that the companies are “taking the law into their own hands” by forcing the issue.
A third man has died in Japan after receiving an injection from one of three batches of Moderna vaccines since identified as contaminated, though authorities say no causal link has yet been found.
The 49-year-old man had his second shot on 11 August and died the following day. His only known health issue was an allergy to buckwheat, the health ministry said on Monday. As with the previous two deaths, the ministry said it had yet to establish if the latest fatality was linked to the vaccine.
Gladys Berejiklian under pressure over modelling showing state’s health system to be ‘overwhelmed’ by Covid cases; rapid antigen tests approved for use at home. Follow the latest updates live
The New South Wales government has set a target of zero extinctions of native wildlife in the state’s national parks estate, the first time an Australian government has set the goal.
The environment minister, Matt Kean, said the target, which will apply to all parklands in NSW, was a response to the continued decline of threatened plants and animals and Australia’s status as the country with the highest rate of mammal extinctions.