Covid 19

3 first responders in Florida die of Covid within 3 days

TIM FITZSIMONS
August 9, 2021, 4:08 PM


Authorities in central Florida say the state's latest Covid-19 surge is having a deadly impact on the state's first responders, claiming three of the public servants' lives last week.

The three men — a firefighter, a sheriff's deputy and a police officer — all died within three days of one another, NBC affiliate WESH of Orlando reported.

Driver Engineer Scott Allender died Tuesday "after battling COVID-19 since early July," the Melbourne Fire Department said in a statement.

"Scott Allender was an important and vibrant member of the Melbourne Fire Department and will be dearly missed by all who knew him," Fire Chief Chuck Bogle said. "Our deepest sympathy is extended to the Allender family."

Craig Seijos, 54, a deputy with the Orange County Sheriff's Department, died Thursday.

The sheriff's department said in a statement that Seijos had worked there for nearly three decades.

"Craig dedicated much of his life to serving the residents of Orange County," Sheriff John Mina said. "We will always be grateful for his service and he will never be forgotten.

"Deputy Seijos was a dedicated family man who adored his wife and five adult children," Mina said. "His colleagues say he was an extremely generous person and was always willing to donate to a good cause. Deputy Seijos also never shied away from a healthy debate."

And the Port Orange Police Department posted that Officer Justin White, 39, died from Covid-19 on Thursday.

The police department said White, who is survived by a wife and four children, was "a dedicated husband, father, and a fierce advocate for the officers he worked alongside."

Mike Chitwood, sheriff of nearby Volusia County, sent condolences after White's death, saying in a tweet that over 300 law enforcement officers have died because of Covid-19, making it "by far the biggest single cause of line-of-duty death."

"More than the senseless murders we see all too often," Chitwood wrote. "May Justin White rest in peace, may his family find the strength & support they need to carry on in his memory."

Florida's latest Covid surge, fueled by the contagious delta variant, is having a devastating impact on unvaccinated communities. A church in Jacksonville this month said six of its unvaccinated members died from the virus within 10 days of one another.

 

Baton Rouge General Medical Center

 

Workers Fired for Being Unvaccinated May Not Be Able to Collect Unemployment Benefits

Josephine Nesbit
Mon, August 9, 2021, 10:57 AM·

As people continue to return to the office amidst the surging Delta variant, more employers are requiring employees to get the COVID-19 vaccination or risk losing their jobs. However, if you are fired for refusing to get vaccinated, the company has the right to terminate your employment for violating company policy. And, if you refuse to get one and quit or are terminated, you won’t be eligible for unemployment benefits.

CNN revealed that it had fired three unvaccinated employees for violating the company’s vaccine requirement for in-person workers, according to an internal memo signed by Jeff Zucker, the cable network’s president, obtained by the New York Times. According to employment law experts, the three former CNN employees likely won’t receive unemployment benefits, reports MarketWatch.

To receive unemployment benefits, most individuals must prove that they are out of work through no fault of their own. Unemployment benefits may also be unlikely if one quits due to vaccination refusal, although state workforce departments are able to make changes to that eligibility requirement.

“Typically, an employee who is terminated for failing to comply with company policies is not eligible for unemployment benefits, which would include refusing to comply with a company’s COVID-19 prevention policies, masking requirements or vaccine requirements,” Alana Ackels, a labor and employment lawyer at Bell Nunnally, a Dallas-based law firm, told MarketWatch.

Rebecca Dixon, executive director at the National Employment Law Project, told MarketWatch that an employee who has proof of a medical exemption or religious objection to receiving the vaccine may still be eligible to collect unemployment benefits if terminated.

The New York Times reported that other large companies — including Facebook and Google — have said they will require employees to be vaccinated in order to return to the office. Some companies, including The Washington Post, have made vaccination a condition of further employment; however, few have given details about the consequences of violating vaccine requirements.

“This could lead to tens of thousands of people across the United States without work or access to unemployment benefits because they refuse to get vaccinated,” Ronald Zambrano, employment law chair at West Coast Trial Lawyers, a Los Angeles-based law firm, told MarketWatch.

 

Breaking News: Johnston County Board of Education has REVERSED their mask policies tonight, and will require all students to wear face masks while in school. Thank you Johnston County leaders for paying close attention to increasing Covid infections in the South, and for putting the protection of public health, especially Johnston County children first. Now if only the adults who these children depend on to DO RIGHT, will finally get vaccinated!

 

Mississippi and Texas are now asking for additional medical staff and resources after discouraging people from getting the vaccine, and turning a public health crisis into a political manureshow. I’m beginning to think that no adult, with the preventable Delta variant, should be admitted right now to hospitals. Why give the bulk of our medical resources to irresponsible, irrational, and arrogant adults who have failed to protect children, and other vulnerable people, because they just don’t care? And why let these patients monopolize hospital resources which could be used for patients in need of other surgeries and treatments unrelated to unnecessary Covid infections? In a matter of days, hospitals in some Southern states will be overrun. And where is Trump? He got this vaccine developed on the fast track, but is NOT promoting it in any meaningful way to save American lives.

Why is that?

 

Interesting news today regarding Rand Paul’s wife, Kelly, who invested in Remdesivir, an early Covid treatment product, produced by Gilead Sciences, which proved ineffective to prevent or cure Covid. (Just ONE vial of Remdesivir cost $520, while the rest of the so-called “treatment” cost $3100.) Kelly Rand invested in Remdesivir in February 2020, long before the American public knew much about Covid, which later happened in mid-March 2020. For 16 MONTHS Rand Paul kicked the can down the road before disclosing of this investment, after it finally became necessary for him to do so. Today, Rand Paul is disavowing any prior knowledge of his wife’s investment, while having spent MONTHS discouraging Americans from getting an effective, and FREE vaccine. The silver lining to all of this may be the fact that Kelly Paul lost money on their Remdesivir investment, which is always so nice to hear when people try to cynically profit over the illness and death of other Americans.

 

It is simply corruption incarnate to allow a sitting Senator or Representative to invest in the Stock Market. If a Senator or Representative is filing taxes jointly with his/her spouse, then that spouse should also be banned from stock trading. They can set up "blind trusts" to do their investing for them, but those investments have to be truly "blind", including deferring filing profit and loss calculations from taxes until after the Senator/Rep has left office,

People who craft legislation over fiscal matters should not be allowed to "play the Market". They have the ultimate "insider information", and if they ran for Congress primarily to get rich, then they need to stay home and take their chances in the Private Sector like everybody else.

 

We just spoke with one of our friends in Texas. Their daughter just quit her job as a phlebotomist at the local hospital. This was her first job since graduating college and she is now reconsidering her career choice. She was the only phlebotomist and was assigned to the Covid floor where she witnessed two unnecessary deaths this week. The fact she was thrust into the Covid mess so soon after her graduation did not leave sufficient time for her to acclimate to the life and death potential of the healthcare providers. As it was she saw more death than life and was overwhelmed. Now she may recover enough to remain in her healthcare career but not in a hospital environment and not for a period of time. This was avoidable on so many levels, but the government of Texas has gone in their words... Bat crap crazy now.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with your comment, and don’t excuse ANYONE, or ANY PARTY from profiting from “insider information”. Corruption is CORRUPTION, and inexcusable, no matter where it comes from, and it hurts all Americans. It seems that February 2020 was an important time when “insider information” was shared, and some of our elected officials decided to “feather their own nests”, rather than focus on making decisions that would protect American public health. And I will guarantee you that all of these elected officials who are are now pretending to be unvaccinated ARE actually vaccinated right now. Do not doubt for a minute that they have already high-tailed their sorry butts and gotten themselves vaccinated and protected, as soon as the vaccine became available to them - because if Rand Paul’s February 2020 investment proves anything - it’s that these cretins will take care of their OWN INTERESTS FIRST, while everybody else be damned. And I would just love for someone to get ahold of the vaccination records of these folks and publish them, so that we have solid evidence that their mendacious, public rhetoric does not, in any way, match up with their personal reality. Not one bit!

 

In addition an old employee contacted me yesterday for advice and a possible reference. They had been approached concerning a position in Texas but they were concerned about moving there given the way the government has been pushing the "freedom' to die approach. This was a really good offer, with very good benefits and a guarantee buyout of their home here along with a housing allowance there to allow them time to find another house. The company had been chasing this person for a few weeks trying to convince them to take this position. The company even considered making a local position to allow them to hire and allow some remote work until their youngest graduated high school and would agree to a move. For someone to question a 6 figure income with those benefits with the ability to remote work in this day solely because of the state government actions says a lot.

 

I have seen so many nurses lately in video interviews, some with more than 20 years of nursing experience, exhausted and emotionally drained, watching people die needlessly. With a lot of Southern hospitals now filling to capacity, our healthcare workers are being forced to work in a “wartime” situation, all unnecessary, fighting this virus on the ground and trying to save lives. Meanwhile, the “leadership” in some of these states, are gas-lighting our healthcare workers by telling them that there is no “war”. This is nothing short of the continued ABUSE of our healthcare workers, who we depend on for care whenever we get sick.

If by chance, and God forbid, that the South gets hit right now with a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, or any other unforeseen emergency, there won’t be ANYBODY available to help people in some areas of the country. No wonder, nurses and other healthcare workers are walking away from their jobs! Some are reporting seeing more death, than they’ve ever seen in their ENTIRE professional careers. Is THIS how we show our gratitude to the very people who care for us and our families? By saddling them unnecessarily with psychological trauma just because some of us are too selfish and arrogant to change course when the conditions demand it? And whatever happened to the conservative promotion of “family values”? Do “family values” now include killing your own children and family members in service to a cockamamie rhetoric which chooses so-called, personal “freedom” over public health? What kind of country have we become?

 

File this one under "whoopsie."

https://www.wral.com/conservative-nc-lawmaker-ill-wife-hospitalized-with-covid/19823341/

RALEIGH, N.C. — Rep.

Keith Kidwell
R-Beaufort has posted on Facebook that his wife Viki is very ill with COVID.


In a post dated Tuesday and updated Thursday, Kidwell writes that his wife is in Beaufort Hospital.

"Kidwell is the main sponsor of bills that would limit the governor's emergency powers, ban the governor from mandating vaccines by executive order and bar state agencies from requiring the shots for licensing purposes.

In prior Facebook posts, Kidwell has decried “vaccine passports,” employer mandates, mask requirements, and efforts to get more people vaccinated, calling vaccine campaigns “manipulation.”

Kidwell has also reposted stories and posts casting doubt on the danger of COVID and calling into question the safety of the vaccines.

WRAL News has asked Rep. Kidwell whether he is vaccinated. He did not immediately respond."

 

Here’s the numbskull Kidwell, trying for “both sides” rhetoric, where on the one hand he “recognizes the importance of vaccines”, but spends the rest of his communication contradicting that initial statement, and then undermining the legal right of private businesses to change their policies in order to protect their employees, and by extension, public health. Meanwhile, Kidwell’s wife is in the hospital infected with Covid and fighting for her life, and Kidwell, also infected, is on Facebook asking for “prayers”.

 

No thanks, Keith Kidwell. I will reserve my prayers for those responsible nurses who are vaccinated and taking care of sick children in hospitals right now, children who have been FAILED by half of the population, rather than some politician who has been too afraid, or self-interested to go up against the GOP status quo and just tell the truth.

 

Derek Miller

@dmiller2300

How the game is played, by people like
@SenRonJohnson



Report: Ron Johnson pushed for tax break benefitting megadonors
The deductions resulted in more than $79 million in tax savings for two families in 2018 alone, the report said.
madison.com
2:30 PM · Aug 11, 2021

 

Derek Miller is a wise and rare Christian these days:

 

Deep 6 this thread,,,

 

Buzz, you might want to try this for a change ......

 

In the exhibition of extreme political hypocrisy, Gov. DeSantis proposes to us an emergency approved medication to lessen the effects of contracting Covid-19 instead of using an emergency approved vaccine to prevent contracting Covid-19 or lessening the impact at a much lower cost because the government paid for the development. Of course, Sen. Rand Paul makes money in the emergency approved treatment so that is a benefit for the Governor.


https://www.local10.com/news/florid...-and-monoclonal-antibodies-to-fight-covid-19/

DeSantis sets plan for Regeneron monoclonal antibodies to fight COVID-19

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rolled out a new state treatment plan to help fight COVID-19, announcing Thursday that the state will start dispensing Regeneron monoclonal antibodies through mobile clinics.

DeSantis made the announcement in Jacksonville, which has been particularly hard hit by the delta variant, but he curiously didn’t say a word about the record increase in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.

Regeneron is the treatment former President Donald Trump received when he came down with COVID-19 last year.

DeSantis is urging people at high risk — the elderly, the obese, people with diabetes — to get the monoclonal antibodies at the first indication of COVID-19.

Florida is making the antibody therapies more widely available by opening a rapid response unit in Jacksonville with an eye toward expanding across the state.