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• Coronavirus vaccine will make some people think they’re sick. But they’re not:
For a fraction of people, getting these first COVID-19 vaccines could be unpleasant—more than the usual unpleasantness of getting a shot. They might make you feel sick for a day or two, even though they contain no whole viruses to actually infect you. Both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are quite “reactogenic”—meaning they stimulate a strong immune response that can cause temporary but uncomfortable sore arms, fevers, chills, and headaches. In other words, getting them might suck a little, but it’s nowhere near as bad as COVID-19 itself.
Reactogenicity happens to some degree with all vaccines and is not in itself a safety concern. Vaccines, after all, work by tricking the body into thinking it has been infected, and these “symptoms” are an indication it has successfully done so. The fever, fatigue, and other signs we associate with colds or flu or even COVID-19 are typically caused by our immune responses, not the virus itself. “A reactogenic vaccine is not the same thing as an unsafe vaccine,” says Saad Omer, a vaccinologist and the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
• Florida court clerks create clever scam to skim millions in fees: The elected court clerks operate outside their official duties as an online cashier and collect millions of dollars in “convenience” fees through a private corporation owned by the Florida Court Clerks and Comptrollers. When a lawsuit is initiated, a couple files divorce papers, a parent makes a child support payment, or other court-related action is undertaken, the clerks’ company, CiviTek, charges a 3.5% convenience fee. For the clerks, that means the processing of an estimated $500 million a year from Floridians caught up in the court system brings them a hefty haul. No money is going directly into the clerks’ pockets. These profits from fees pay for the clerks’ special projects outside the budget allotted by the Florida Legislature. They are also outside the purview of the state’s sunshine law, so the exact amounts are unknown. A class action lawsuit has been brought by two women assert that the clerks created CiviTek to crush any competition, allowing them to charge excessive fees to benefit their association’s goals.
• Elizabeth Warren reintroduces her proposed ban on stock trading by members of Congress: Currently, there are few restrictions against individual trades by congressional lawmakers. The two Republican candidates in the pivotal Senate run-off in Georgia—David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler—have taken considerable flak for buying and selling stocks after they gained information that made such trades profitable. The proposed ban is part of the anti-corruption plan that Warren touted on the campaign trail as her first priority if she became president. Besides the trading ban, the bill proposes lifetime bans on lobbying for former members of Congress, stricter conflict-of-interest rules, and prohibiting lobbyists from fundraising for political candidates. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Washington Democrat, introduced a companion bill in the House. In a joint statement, the two women said, “After nearly four years of the most corrupt president in American history and with U.S. senators brazenly trading stocks to profit off a raging pandemic, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act is more urgent than ever.”
• Myon Burrell who served nearly 18 years for a crime it seems apparent he did not commit is out of prison with his family: He was convicted at age 16 because of a stray bullet that in 2002 struck and killed Tyesha Edwards, a sixth-grader. He was convicted on the testimony of six jailhouse informants, some of whom received reduced sentences as a result. He always said he was innocent. Advocates relentless sought to get Burrell released. Last year, the Associated Press exposed flaws in that investigation. One of these was the failure to check out a nearby store’s surveillance video. Burrell said he could have been cleared by that video. A subsequent panel of independent experts confirmed much of the AP account uncovered and said the police investigation had engaged in “tunnel vision.” A week after its report came out, Burrell, now 34. was at home in Minneapolis with his family and has a job lined up. Although the rest of his 20 year sentence was commuted by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, but he was not pardoned. Burrell and his advocates will continue to work for full exoneration.
• Two federal prisoners scheduled for execution in Trump’s killing spree test positive for COVID-19: On death row in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where they are scheduled to executed next month, Cory Johnson and Dustin John Higgs have tested positive for the disease brought by the coronavirus. A third inmate in the facility, Lisa Montgomery, is also on the execution roster. If carried out, it will the first time the feds have executed a woman in 67 years. The Trump regime resumed federal executions in July, 17 years after the last one. It has so far executed 10 people, more than the seven executed this year by all the states where the death penalty is still on the books. It’s also more in a single year than under any president since Grover Cleveland’s second term of office. Johnson’s lawyers said being infected will would make it difficult to interact with him in the days immediately before the execution: “The widespread outbreak on the federal death row only confirms the reckless disregard for the lives and safety of staff, prisoners, and attorneys alike.” Nationally, some one in five prisoners state and federal prisoners have contracted COVID-19, and 1,700 have died.
• Zoom executive harged with doctoring child porn to smear Tiananmen Square Memorial activists:
American prosecutors have charged a Zoom executive in an elaborate scheme to disrupt video meetings of activists who planned to commemorate the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. The complaint and arrest warrant for Xinjiang Jin, a Zoom employee and the company’s liaison to Chinese law enforcement, were unsealed by the Department of Justice.
“As detailed in the complaint, Jin’s co-conspirators created fake email accounts and [Zoom] accounts in the names of others, including [People’s Republic of China] political dissidents, to fabricate evidence that the hosts of and participants in the meetings to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre were supporting terrorist organizations, inciting violence or distributing child pornography,” the Justice Department said in a press release.
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