☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Thursday, September 23, 2021 ☙ Enjoined 🦠

News about the first constitutional anti-vaccine decision in the entire country (apart from religious objections), a tremendous new rule from Florida’s new Surgeon General that is going to ...

Good morning C&C family! In fact it is a GREAT morning. Today’s roundup includes news about the first constitutional anti-vaccine decision in the entire country (apart from religious objections), a tremendous new rule from Florida’s new Surgeon General that is going to make a LOT of parents and kids VERY happy, Biden’s approval slips badly with black Americans, another Sheriff refuses to enforce unconstitutional vaccine ultimatums, experts make more bad decisions with predictable results, and Joe Biden reveals that he is really a poor reflection of a Bond movie villain or something.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

☎️ The 5DAY calls continue! We now focus on our incoming speaker of the house and president of the senate. Hopefully some of the developing news will encourage the lawmakers to do the right thing. We are keeping the pressure on.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 BOOOOM. In a decision that rocked Gainesville, sent tremors throughout Florida, and provided peace and comfort to my 250 plaintiffs and their families, not to mention the many other Gainesville City employees struggling with the decision of whether or not to take the jab by the end of the week, the Court granted our preliminary injunction and restrained the City of Gainesville from enforcing its odious “vaccination ultimatum” policy.

You can read the judge’s order here: https://tinyurl.com/bz83ca6d.

If you are a serious Covid legal junkie with a pack-a-day habit, you can read the hearing transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/259cvxae.

The City was hamstrung by its decision not to put on any evidence of a compelling state interest. Both at the hearing and in her order, the judge seemed flabbergasted at the City’s lack of an evidentiary case. At the hearing, the City’s attorneys claimed they’d been surprised, that I’d just raised the privacy arguments and it was the first time they were hearing them. But not only was the right of privacy argument fully set out in my complaint, filed weeks ago, but it was also described in detail in a brief that I filed several days before the hearing (https://tinyurl.com/ncpu745e). So, I’m not too sure what they were talking about right there.

Anyway, I have seen many tweets and Facebook comments mocking the City attorneys for their decision. But they are competent professionals with good reputations and I assume they made a calculated strategic decision NOT to put on evidence. My best guess is that they were confident they could avoid implicating the constitutional right of privacy using their legal arguments. They made a LOT of legal arguments. Maybe they were thinking that, if they did put on evidence, they’d be conceding that the right to privacy MIGHT be implicated. Or something.

I can’t say too much about the case because it is ongoing. The injunction restrains the City from enforcing its “vaccination ultimatum” until further notice, which is generally after the trial resolves the issue. Since the injunction must presume that the employees are “substantially likely to prevail on the merits,” I like our odds. The City Commission will be meeting today and discussing their options, which include seeking an appeal or trying to pull something clever with a new improved policy. Which would be dangerous for them, and would probably constitute contempt of court, which of course is what we’d immediately seek.

The better answer for the City would be to take a deep breath, slow their roll a little, and think about better ways to encourage and motivate their workforce apart from issuing diktats and ultimatums right and left. Not to mention the disgraceful commissioner Reina Saco, who was shown in a recent video making an obscene gesture at a group of peaceful employee protestors, including firemen and cops and KIDS. (Link: https://tinyurl.com/wvmynzwc). Or, for that matter, mayor Lauren Poe, who once invited Antifa to come to Gainesville whenever they want (https://tinyurl.com/7xaucf), incredibly tried to defend Saco’s indefensible “performance.” Saco and Poe both supported the City’s vaccine ultimatum.

It need hardly be said, but public officials who are so scornful and unprofessional toward the people they represent probably shouldn’t be in office to begin with. Know what I mean?

Saco’s email, if you have any suggestions for her, is sacore@cityofgainesville.org. Mayor Poe can be reached at poelb@cityofgainesville.org.

Anyway, there are a lot of other ways to improve workplace Covid safety apart from mandatory vaccine ultimatums. Maybe the City could spend ten minutes talking about some of those other options? Asking for a bunch of friends.

🦸‍♂️ It’s already working! Florida’s new Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, issued an emergency Department of Health rule yesterday. It has a lot of good stuff in it, two GIANT things in particular.

On the masks. The new emergency rule clarifies the parental opt-out requirement. It NOW says, “Schools may adopt requirements for students to wear masks or facial coverings as a mitigation measure; however, the school must allow for a parent or legal guardian of the student to opt the student out of wearing a face covering or mask at the parent or guardian’s sole discretion.”

See those words, “sole discretion?” They just nuked the whole “doctor’s note” thing. The parent doesn’t need a doctor’s note, and the school doesn’t get to “decide” whether to “approve” the opt-out. It’s within the parents’ SOLE discretion.

Florida parents should bring their kids to school maskless today along with a copy of the new emergency rule with paragraph (1)(d) highlighted. Here’s a link to the rule: https://tinyurl.com/yubhueyb.

The second major item in the rule is the new quarantine procedures. The emergency order shuts down schools’ witless tactic of sending entire classes of perfectly healthy kids home “just in case.” No mas. If kids don’t have symptoms of illness, they can come to school if their parents choose to send them. Imagine that. We’re going to stop treating the kids as if they were all plague carriers or something, which was the dumbest idea that a pack of clinically depressed scientists ever came up with.

Parents can choose whether to quarantine their kids after receiving a contact-tracing notice if they want to. PARENTS. And anecdotally, I can tell you that a bunch of these contact-tracing calls are super sketchy. Clients have reported numerous cases where contact tracers refused to provide their full names, refused to put things in writing, and refused to identify the allegedly Covid-positive person that initiated the trace in the first place. So now, parents can decide for themselves whether the contact tracing information is credible enough to keep their kids home.

And look at this: the rule says that contact-traced but healthy students MUST be allowed to “attend school, school-sponsored activities, or be on school property, without restrictions or disparate treatment, so long as the student remains asymptomatic.”

Without restrictions or disparate treatment. Hello! Goodbye, teachers who have sick fantasies about bullying children whose parents want them unmasked! No restrictions or disparate treatment. So. Go get ‘em, parents.

😢 The Morning Consult reported that Joe Biden’s popularity among black Americans is falling fast. Biden’s job performance is down 5% just since he announced the federal vaccine mandate two weeks ago, while his disapproval rating leapt up 7%. Among unvaccinated black voters, Biden’s net approval rating is down 17%. And just over the last few weeks, black Americans’ favorable rating of Biden’s handling of the pandemic has dropped almost 10%. So.

👮‍♂️ Add Manatee County Sheriff Wells to the list of courageous sheriffs who have said they will not enforce unconstitutional vaccine mandates.

🔫 According to an article in the New York Times, the U.S. experienced a 30% spike in murder deaths in 2020 — the highest spike ever recorded, beating all previous spikes by orders of magnitude. The previous record was a +12.7% jump in 1968. So. Thanks a lot, experts. Genius.

😷 Ruh-roh! The National Review published an article yesterday headlined, “After Mandating Masks Outdoors, Oregon’s Active COVID-19 Cases Increased 73 Percent.” The article reports that “On August 24, Oregon had 49,889 active cases of COVID-19. As of yesterday, Oregon had 86,623 active cases of COVID-19 — an increase of 73 percent from the day the governor announced the outdoor mask requirement.” Oregon’s Covid-19 death rate is also up slightly since the mask mandate was put in place.

Seventy-three percent! That’s a lot. Thanks again, experts! What would we do without you?

🤡 Former Vice-President Joe Biden held a “virtual Covid summit” yesterday. It was scheduled alongside a UN General Assembly meeting, which he did NOT attend. For some reason. And, not many people attended his awesome online summit, either. It’s kind of hard to find any news about it at all, to tell you the truth.

But the New York Times did report that Biden’s sense of self-importance has swelled up even bigger than the morbidly obese CDC clown that is crushing the poor medical establishment’s credibility unicycle. Just a couple weeks ago Biden announced that it was his mission to vaccinate the entire U.S. of A. But now, he sees that his mission is even bigger: to vaccinate the ENTIRE WORLD.

I am not making that up.

The Times described that Biden has “set out ambitious goals on Wednesday for ending the pandemic and urged world leaders, drug companies, philanthropies and nonprofit groups to embrace a target of vaccinating 70 percent of the world by next year.”

Of the WORLD. Biden thinks his mission is to save the WORLD by jabbing everybody. Well, when I say “thinks,” I mean, you know.

Vaccinating the entire world will be super expensive. That’s a problem. But don’t worry. He’s going to use YOUR money to do it: “Mr. Biden announced a series of actions, including the purchase of an additional 500 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine at a not-for-profit price to donate overseas and $370 million to administer the shots. Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the United States would donate $250 million to a new global fund that aims to raise $10 billion to prevent future pandemics.”

“Put another way, for every one shot we’ve administered to pay in America, we have now committed to do three shots to the rest of the world,” Mr. Biden said. Seems fair.

Is it just me, or is it kind of weird that the NYT is referring to Biden as “Mister” Biden instead of the other thing? Just saying.

Have a terrific Thursday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow morning for more fun and games.

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