☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Saturday, October 30, 2021 ☙ WINNING 🦠

Two huge wins in two separate courts yesterday; the CDC somehow misplaces the most important Covid data; Ice Cube says Hell No; Biden can't get why employees are so upset; the narrative shatters ...

Happy Saturday, C&C people. We have a lot of ground to cover today. There were two significant — great — developments in our cases yesterday. And in the news: the CDC drops the ball on its most basic job responsibility; Ice Cube freezes a movie deal over jabs; a DC judge moves to block the federal contractor mandate and Biden’s attorneys equivocate; Bloomberg breaks the narrative; a hockey outbreak and death breaks the narrative some more; and finally, new Covid figures from the State to analyze and they complete smashing the narrative into teeny-tiny little bits.

🗞 { THE C&C ARMY POST } 🗞

For those of you law nerds following our various Covid legal adventures, there were two spectacular developments in our cases yesterday.

🔥 MASK CASE. The First District Court of Appeals issued a scathing order in our case against Alachua and Duval Counties yesterday evening. I’ll start with the end—the Court held that the school boards “cannot stand between parents and their lawful right to make decisions on behalf of their children.” Boom. It then shot the case back down to the local circuit court for an immediate hearing with instructions for exactly how the circuit court should proceed.

Judge Long, who penned the opinion for the First, instantaneously perceived the bigger issue at play—the role of the rule of law during a pandemic: “Society’s collective response to the COVID-19 virus has become a cultural and political flash point. But despite its dressing, this case is not a dispute about the wisest public policy response to the virus … This case turns on a question of more enduring substance. The foundational question before us is whether the respondent government actors are required to comply with the laws that govern their authority.”

That’s exactly right. School board officials have to follow the law too.

Next, the First described the DOH’s emergency rule, and then found that the school boards were breaking the law: “Respondents have refused to comply with this rule,” and found that the school boards were remarkably recalcitrant about their lawbreaking: “Respondents have been remarkably open in their defiance. … they acknowledge they are defying the law, but argue the courts should refuse to compel their compliance.”

The Court was VERY clear that it is the DOH’s job to make pandemic rules, NOT the school boards: "Section 1003.22(3) requires ‘[t]he [DOH], after consultation with the Department of Education,’ to ‘adopt rules governing . . . the control of preventable communicable diseases.’ State law requires local school boards to follow these rules.”

The order says the parents are now entitled to an “IMMEDIATE” hearing and a prompt decision: “We direct the Chief Judge of each circuit to assign the petition to a circuit judge and that the assigned circuit judges ensure an immediate hearing and a prompt decision on the merits of the petition.”

Since the First DCA already found that the school boards are breaking the law, there is only one single factual issue for the circuit court to decide: whether the parents and kids are in the districts or not. The Court said, “[Parents] allege that they are parents of children directly affected by [School Boards]’s non-compliant policies. [The School Boards] have disputed this and created a question of fact that must first be resolved by the circuit court.”

So now we’re off to Circuit Court to promptly resolve the inane question of whether these parents are actually parents in the districts or not. The Circuit Court is bound to follow the First DCA, its supervisory court, and has to apply all of the other holdings. So there won’t be anything for the Circuit Court to do except make that one single finding of fact. Ridiculous, but that’s the silly position that the School Boards have taken.

This is a huge victory. Stay tuned for rapidly-developing news.

🔥 VACCINE CASE. Meanwhile, in Circuit Court, we also saw a victory in our client employees’ injection injunction case against the City of Gainesville. Late yesterday afternoon, the Court issued an Order DENYING the City’s Motion for Reconsideration of the Injunction.

After we won the injunction, the City announced that it had changed its mind and revoked the policy. So never mind! But then its lawyers filed their motion asking the court to reconsider its original opinion and vacate (drop) the injunction that was stopping it from enforcing its odious and reprehensible vaccine mandate. Obviously, the City hadn’t changed its mind after all.

So, after considering our competing legal briefs, late yesterday the Court entered its order denying the City’s try at getting a second bite at the legal apple. And, like the First DCA’s order in the mask case, the order was a knockout. The judge let the City have it, with a strongly-worded critique about its assumption that the court would just rubber-stamp whatever the City said.

The Court explained, “the City argued that the ‘court is on notice of the CDC’s findings’ and thus, the City should not be required to justify the health measures taken for its employees. However, the City’s assertion that the “court is on notice” is an inaccurate statement of fact.”

An inaccurate statement of fact! That’s a nice way of saying something else. What do we call it again, that thing when people say stuff that isn’t truthful? I can’t remember.

Here’s the best part. This is really the crux of this case, and it’s true for every court across this country. The Circuit Court patiently explained to the City that it can only rule on the evidence put before it. It can’t rely on statements like “everybody knows” or “the president said.” The Court needs facts and testimony, which the City didn’t provide:

“Courts decide legal disputes based on the evidence that comes before the court. In this case, the City failed to provide any evidence and failed to call any witness to testify that in creating the City’s policy they relied on any specific findings of the CDC (or any other entity such as OSHA, EEOC, the local COVID dashboard, etc.) to create a policy that was the least restrictive means to serve a compelling State interest. It is not the role of the Court to speculate, infer, assume, or consider information beyond the evidence presented by the parties to a suit.”

The City’s only move left is to appeal the decision. But it faces two intractable problems: first, it is now stuck with the “record,” meaning the evidence it put on at the hearing. But there is none. So it has no record. That’s a big problem for an appeal.

Second, the First DCA is the same court that already found earlier this year (in our Green case) that a mask mandate is presumptively unconstitutional. So, it’s predictable they’ll also agree that an INJECTION mandate is presumptively unconstitutional, since it’s even MORE invasive of bodily autonomy than a mask mandate. However awful the dirty face rags are.

⚖️ That’s TWO huge victories in one afternoon. That’s amazing, and it’s especially gratifying because of all the incredibly hard work that’s gone into these cases. Still, we need a lot more of them to shift the momentum. I’m doing everything I can to help other attorneys get up to speed on the issues and the best practices. It’s starting to work. But we still have a LOT of hard work left to do. If these developments are encouraging to you, please consider supporting our mission.

📣 As of midday yesterday there were still a handful of tickets left for next Saturday’s conference at the posh World Equestrian Center in Ocala featuring luminaries such as Doctors Peter McCulloch, Ryan Cole, and Robert Malone, not to mention your favorite blogging lawyer. Here’s the link: [Florida Summit on Covid Tickets, Sat, Nov 6, 2021 at 10:00 AM | Eventbrite].

🗞{COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY} 🗞

🔥 Investigative reporter Sharyl Atkinson published a blog post this week describing her heroic but fruitless attempts to get some very basic information out of the CDC. Apparently, since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC had been keeping track of the number of Americans estimated to have been naturally infected by Covid-19 … up till five months ago, when it mysteriously stopped tracking and publishing those figures, without any explanation.

Atkinson said she sent a public records request to the CDC, asking the agency for some updated numbers. On October 5, a CDC official said they would be “updated shortly.” But so far — nothing. The CDC has not responded to Atkinson’s public records request, nor has it updated the figures on its Covid dashboard.

Some people call the CDC “the gold standard.” For some reason. But now those scatterbrained experts have somehow lost track of possibly the most important figure of all: how many natural infections we’ve had. How can we tell if we have achieved herd immunity without these numbers? What is the CDC good for, if it isn’t even able to keep track of basic figures like the naturally immune?

Gold standard? More like the “clay standard.” Or, more like some kind of standard involving potty humor. Which is far beneath the dignity of Coffee & Covid, as you know. Well, maybe not far beneath, or at all, really, but you get the idea.

🔥 The Hollywood Reporter announced yesterday that rapper-slash-actor Ice Cube was all set to star in Sony's upcoming comedy "Oh Hell No,” but promptly quit the project after the producers said he had to take the injections. He was going to make $9 million dollars for the role. Nine million dollars.

I guess he said, “Oh Hell No” to the jab AND the movie AND the nine million bucks. Kind of ironic, right?

🔥 A D.C. district court judge issued a short order Thursday asking the Biden administration to agree that both civilian and active-duty military plaintiffs will not be terminated pending a final ruling on a lawsuit over the employees’ religious objections to the injections. Do you suppose Biden’s attorneys agreed to hold off? Of course not. They refused to agree.

Well, sort of.

The problem seems to be that the Biden folks have not been willing to say whether the employees will actually be terminated or not. Who knows? It’s a mystery. An enigma. There’s no way to know for sure. “Plaintiffs offer nothing beyond speculation to suggest that their religious exception requests will be denied and that they will be disciplined at all, much less on the first day that such discipline is theoretically possible," wrote Biden’s lawyers in their filing yesterday.

So, according to Biden’s lawyers, the plaintiff employees are just “speculating” that they’ll be disciplined or fired if they don’t take the injections by the deadline. Gosh. I wonder where the employees got that idea? They’re probably just overreacting.

💉 Bloomberg reported on the recent blockbuster UK study Thursday in an article headlined, “Vaccinated People Also Spread the Delta Variant, Yearlong Study Shows.” Here’s the first line in the article:

“People inoculated against Covid-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus to contacts in their household as those who haven’t had shots, according to new research.”

Isn’t that interesting? Whoever could have possibly seen this coming? Not the experts. They completely missed it. No way they could have known.

You know, there are times when I start to think the experts are as useless as a bag of ticks. Silly, of course, but there it is.

So, anyway, now what happens to the narrative? What about the fairy tale that uninjected people are some kind of threat to injected folks? What now justifies having uninjected people test all the time, double mask, eat outside, and use their own separate-but-unequal bathrooms?

Science? Shut up? Where do they go from here?

By the way, I also find it interesting that the media is starting to use the word “inoculated” instead of “vaccinated.” I don’t know what the change means, but it means something. I suspect the CDC’s recent re-definition of the word “vaccinated” has something to do with it.

The internet defines inoculated as “treat (a person or animal) with a vaccine to produce immunity against a disease.” I guess the CDC has to redefine the word “inoculated” now. No rest for the wicked, I suppose.

🏒 On Thursday, Canadian newspapers ran a story headlined “Beloved father, teammate dies following COVID-19 outbreak among men's hockey players.” An outbreak? With a death? Among that small group? That’s alarming. All those amateur hockey players must have been uninjected, right?

Nope.

Not according to Canadian health officials, who said the infected players were all jabbed. “All are considered breakthrough infections because they were among fully vaccinated people, the health unit said.”

All.

All of them.

One of the players “was admitted to hospital after having trouble breathing, and ended up in the intensive care unit.” His family said he “had no underlying risk factors aside from his age, such as diabetes or obesity, that can make COVID-19 deadly.” Days later, “when his condition suddenly declined, he was put on a ventilator.” You know what happened next, right? What happens after you go on the vent?

“That's when health-care workers noticed he had suffered a massive stroke and he was eventually put on life support.” They “noticed?” Okay. At least they noticed, somehow. Not like they were looking for it or anything. That’s free healthcare for you.

So anyway, then “the family decided to take him off life support and Weston died in the hospital last Thursday.”

Safe and effective.

The silver lining is that the deceased hockey player’s daughter is still optimistic about the injections, and encourages everyone to get jabbed. "Just because you're wearing a seatbelt doesn't mean you're not going to die in a car accident,” she told reporters.

It’s nice she always looks on the bright side. You win some, you lose some. Just like hockey.

📊 {COVID IN FLORIDA AND ALACHUA COUNTY} 📊

We have a new weekly report to analyze, and guess what? Florida is doing EVEN BETTER. Having already earned the record for the lowest Covid-19 infection rate in all 50 states, Florida continues improving. Let’s dig in:

🔥 Check out “Covid-19” involved deaths. They plummeted, from 106 last week to only 56 today. In other words, they were halved in ONE WEEK. A 50% reduction in seven days. That’s HUGE. Hysterical hospitals and media experts are looking at a very difficult narrative problem now. How can they keep scaring people into getting the shots? Oh wait, I forgot. By threatening their jobs. Never mind.

🔥 Which is probably why jab totals are up across the state—employer mandates.

🔥 “Cases” fell, again, from 15,314 to only 12,880.

🔥 The positivity ratio is scraping the bottom, just over the false positive rate for PCR tests, in both the state (3.0%) and Alachua County (2.7%), where school kids are still being forced to wear their face masks.

🔥 Florida’s cases per 100K also fell, again, from 69.7 to only 58.6.

🔥 Florida’s Covid-occupied beds fell by 15% in one week, from 2,525 to 2,139.

Florida’s incredible performance might explain this New York Post opinion headline from Thursday: “The country needs a dose of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to battle COVID-19.”

Yep.

🎃 Have a super Saturday, and a spooky fun Halloween tomorrow. Subscribers, I’ll see you then. Everyone else, we’ll get back together Monday to kick off November right, the C&C way.

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