☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Tuesday, November 2, 2021 ☙ IMMEDIATE COMPLIANCE 🦠

Legal analysis of Does v. Mills; Richard Corcoran throws the glove down on rebellious counties; Florida’s hospitalizations hit record lows while Colorado nationalizes its healthcare system...

Good morning C&C family, and Happy Tuesday! Today’s roundup includes: some quick legal analysis of Does v. Mills; Richard Corcoran throws the glove down on rebellious counties; Florida’s hospitalizations hit record lows while Colorado nationalizes its healthcare system; Seattle’s fire departments are working with skeleton crews; Chicago’s police unions catch a break; the NSBA experiences shrinkage; NYC’s cops are NOT laid off in droves after staying uninjected; another study finds natural immunity is durable and long-lasting; tourists get Shanghai’d in China; Psaki remains quarantined; and Israelis may have finally started reaching their spike-protein limits.

👨‍⚖️ *LEGAL ANALYSIS* 👨‍⚖️

Analysts and regular folks were frustrated with the Supreme Court’s latest decision in Does v. Mills, where the Court declined to enjoin Maine’s injection mandate for healthcare workers. Shocking many, Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh joined in turning the case down.

I’ve said this before, but everyone needs to remember: the Court needs to WAIT until it gets the “right” case. It can only hear a few dozen cases a year. If the facts aren’t just right, the Court may not get another chance to do what it needs to do. This particular case only included healthcare workers and was based on religious exemptions; maybe it isn’t the case the Court is looking for to deal with injection mandates. We need to be patient. We’re in a war. There will be some casualties and lost battles before we win.

That said, there are some shiny bright spots in Does v. Mills. Justices Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito joined a lengthy dissent penned by Gorsuch. Every attorney fighting mandates should read it. It’s a script or recipe for how to beat the mandates, at least related to religious exemption denials.

But it’s also kind of an instruction to the district courts on how they should be deciding the cases. And that’s the more important part.

A genius friend of mine likes to say, “who are the most powerful people in this country? District court judges.” That’s because the Supreme Court can only take a handful of cases every year, and most district court decisions are upheld by the Circuit Courts. So appellate options from district court decisions are very limited. Most people are stuck with the district court decision. That makes district court judges the most powerful judges in our system. They nearly always have the last word.

So the Court’s legal instructions to the district courts about mandates are not insignificant. Just the opposite. They’re very significant. While Does v. Mills didn’t grant an injunction to the handful of healthcare workers in that case, it did move the ball down the national field. Hang in there.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Referring to our decision from the appellate court on Friday in the mask-mandamus case, Florida’s Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran tweeted yesterday that: “In light of the First DCA’s opinion declaring the Duval and Alachua County school districts’ forced masking policies in violation of state law, I’m officially putting the districts on notice: immediately come into compliance or face the consequences.”

Um. Immediately come into compliance. “Immediately.” It’s not in their nature to come into compliance. I doubt they’ll listen. They should, but Alachua County’s school board, in particular, created massive amounts of political damage by kicking off the whole “mask rebellion of 2021” in Florida. It was an insane stunt to begin with, and there’s no sign of rational thinking there, at all.

Somebody get me some popcorn.

🔥 On Sunday, there were only 198 new confirmed adult Covid hospital admissions reported in all of Florida. This is the lowest recorded number since HHS first began reporting in July, 2020, or even since the beginning of April 2020 when AHCA started reporting (232). So.

🔥 Meanwhile, in Colorado, hospitalizations are surging so high and so fast that Democrat Governor Jared Polis has just essentially nationalized the state’s hospital system. Colorado has over 1,200 Covid hospitalizations, which is nearly the pandemic’s peak and is tied with last December’s surge.

The new emergency order hands over control of all hospital admissions to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, because the environmental activists who work in that department know better than doctors and nurses which patients need to be admitted into Colorado hospitals, of course. Hospitals still must stabilize patients before sending them away if the department doesn’t approve their admission.

The first order was poorly thought through. I realize that must be a shock to you. So Governor Polis quickly issued a second order that “clarified” the first order, and also gave a huge hint about an even bigger problem headed toward the state; one that Governor Polis created all by himself. Let’s take a look. Polis’ second order directs the state’s department of insurance to cut the red-tape required for admissions and discharges. More efficiency! But look how that paragraph in the order starts:

“Q. Due to severe staffing shortages facing hospitals related to COVID-19 and other emergency hospitalizations and an associated decrease in intensive care unit capacity…”

Severe staffing shortages. “Severe.” I wonder what could have caused those severe staffing shortages? Could it have been Polis’ insane injection mandates that resulted in laying off a bunch of unjabbed doctors and nurses in the middle of a pandemic? Just asking.

Polis, clearly not the brightest bulb on the string, apparently magically believed that Colorado’s high injection rate would somehow stop the state’s seasonal winter Covid wave. He must have seen what Florida’s summer wave looked like, since it was the top story in the news 24 x 7 during the entire time. But instead, grasshopper-like, he didn’t plan for the winter.

Grasshopper Polis has a lot of explaining to do. For some reason, I don’t think putting environmental activists in charge of deciding every single hospital admission in the state is going to work out too well. Happy now, blue-county Coloradans? I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the “North Colorado” movement will gain serious momentum after this little experiment in bad governance.

🔥 Meanwhile, in Seattle, another mysterious “historic staffing crisis” is causing Seattle’s Fire Department to shut down units and beg for massive amounts of overtime from its still-employed firefighters. One SFD lieutenant estimated that the department is now paying $100,000 a DAY in overtime.

Experts are baffled about what could be causing the shortage of experienced firemen. Seattle’s mayor Jenny Durkan said it has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with her injection mandate, how dare you even suggest that. That’s racist. Local media are complaining that SFD is “actively withholding basic information concerning the public safety crisis they are pretending doesn’t exist.” Because everything is so legit. Weird.

🔥 In Chicago, a Cook County judge enjoined the city’s injection mandate as to members of the police union, at least until the city engages in lawful arbitration with the officers. “Our lawyers are looking at the judge’s ruling and looking at what our legal options are,” said Chicago’s lightweight mayor Lori Lightfoot. “But what I know is we cannot stop, we absolutely cannot stop. This is about saving people’s lives.” Uh huh. Sure it is. Taking cops off the streets is ALWAYS about saving lives. One wonders when Lightfoot’s sixth brain cell will start firing. If ever.

🔥 Eleven (11) state school board associations have now withdrawn from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) over its unfortunate letter to Merrick Garland describing soccer moms as “domestic terrorists” because they hurt some school board member’s feelings by accurately criticizing their insane policies. Boom.

🔥 While we don’t have an exact number, the NY Post said sources told it that over 6,500 New York City cops asked for injection exemption requests, and if the 85% injection rate is correct, there are still about 8,000 uninjected members of the city’s police force. But only about 70 were laid off yesterday, which was de Blasio’s jabbing deadline. Did he blink?

🔬 A new study published in Nature Microbiology looked at the antibodies of 38 patients and healthcare workers in St Thomas’ Hospital who were infected back during the first wave of COVID-19, before they were vaccinated. Almost all of them (18/19) still had strong antibody levels ten months later when measured. On the other hand, reports about the study noted the results also showed that the mRNA “vaccines designed around one of these new variants may be less effective against other variants.” Whoops.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Fauci to recognize natural immunity.

🐭 Over 30,000 people got a vacation they didn’t plan on in Shanghai’s Disneyland this weekend, when the park suddenly quarantined them all after a single Chinese tourist tested positive. The PRC Imagineers forced every single guest to undergo Covid testing in order to leave, a process that took hours and hours and didn’t end until after midnight.

Stories about the Shanghai’d guests didn’t clarify whether the Covid tests were the Western nasal swabs or China’s preferred backdoor-probes.

💉 White House spokeslady Jen Psaki, fully injected, remains in quarantine after she caught Covid. It’s SO weird, because back in July, her boss, Joe Biden — who is literally sleeping his way around Europe right now — promised, and I quote, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

So.

💉 Uh-oh. Israelis may have finally had enough spike protein to suit their tastes, which already went much further than I would have ever taken it. Well, technically I have NO appetite for spike protein. Zero. But you get what I’m saying.

Anyway, reports suggest that the market for booster shots in super-highly-injected Israel is sluggish at best. Only about half of them seem to be heading back for more of the spikes. That is especially remarkable because Israel has an injection-passport system that makes you a second-class citizen if you aren’t “fully” injected, which now includes the boosters. So half of Israelis are voluntarily giving up all kinds of rights of travel and access to avoid more spikes.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., where there are no injection passports except in the most deranged and hollowed-out parts of the country, the market for boosters is completely underwater. Only 5% of Americans have taken the third jab — even though it’s free. I wonder why.

📽️ I don’t usually link videos, especially hour-long ones, who has time for that? But this one is a standout. The production values are on the lower side, and the interviewed Belgian psychologist’s accent is a little hard to understand at times, but it’s nevertheless a blockbuster. He describes EXACTLY why people have lost their minds over the mild pandemic and are willing to do whatever the government tells them, no matter how absurd. If you’re interested in those kinds of topics, you’ll really enjoy this:

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