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Post 28 Jul 2021, 9:19 am

rickyp wrote:What you need to do is learn that everything isn't cut and dried us versus them....


:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
:sigh:
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Post 31 Jul 2021, 4:18 am

Freeman,
Do you still think there will be no virus passports from the WH?

What is your legal opinion on whether this is a HIPAA violation or a violation of civil liberties?
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Post 01 Aug 2021, 5:56 pm

I think a state could order vaccine passports as part of its police powers. They were able impose lockdowns under their police powers, so I dont see why they couldnt order vaccine passports under their inherent police power.

But you asked whether the WH could do so. Generally, states have been.held to retain police powers to deal with epidemics/plagues in their own state. See the key US Supreme court case on this: COMPAGNIE FRANCAISE DE NAVIGATION A VAPEUR, Plff. in Err., v. STATE BOARD OF HEALTH, LOUISIANA, et al.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/186/380)

But an argument could be made--particularly in this day and age where transportation between states and other countries is more common and far quicker than it used to be-that federal power is needed to deal effectively with a pandemic, that individual states cant deal with it effectively by themselves. And so the federal government should be able to use its power under the Commerce Clause, even though that would intrude on the traditional state police powers. As to whether a challenge to the federal government issuing vaccine passports would work, I think that depends on the necessity presented to the court as to why issuing those vaccine passports to deal with the pandemic by the federal government are needed to deal with the pandemic. There just isnt case law saying that the federal government could that, so ultimately it will depend on the Supreme Court's view of things. It would be an incredibly important case.

Also, if they went under the Commerce Clause, thats part of the power of Congress, so the White House would have to obtain authority first from the Congress

As to a HIPAA violation--thats a federal medical privacy statute--If the Congress passed a law authorizing the president to issue these vaccine passports, then they have pretty much overriden HIPAA anyway. But what about the constitutional right of privacy in your medical information? The Supreme Court has not recogized that as a right but lower federal.courts have. (See, e.g., Hancock v. County of Rennsselear https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/ap ... 02-09.html)

Assuming there is a constitutional right to privacy in your medical information a court would have to balance the government's need to issue the vaccine passports vs the intrusion on privacy. The level of scrutiny is intermediate if it's legislative in nature--inbetween strict scrutiny where governments actions are almost never upheld (e.g. based on race) and rational basis, where governmental action is almost always upheld. (For example, laws that distinguish based on gender are subject to intermediate scrutiny). If it's executive action then it's objectionable only if it "shocks the conscience". So it looks like executive action is given more discretion and since it appears the action would be from Congress through the Commerce Clause, it might be more likely to be not upheld. I suspect though the federalism argument that states' police powers should not be intruded upon by the federal government is a far stronger argument. I may be wrong but I think the federalism argument would have more sway given the stakes involved here.
Last edited by freeman3 on 02 Aug 2021, 7:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post 02 Aug 2021, 4:29 am

Cogent and informative. Thanks, Freeman.
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Post 04 Aug 2021, 11:32 pm

Legal arguments aside, I hope everyone eligible voluntarily gets vaccinated and soon. The US is getting hit hard by the Delta variant in "slow" season for the virus and with kids out of school (and kids 12 and under still dont have a vaccine.) If it's this bad now...what it will it look like in October?

I know I would be tempted if I had the power to start putting pressure--say by requiring vaccine passports--on unvaccinated people to get the shot to try and avoid all these unnecessary deaths that are going to happen this fall and to try to get a handle on this virus before we get an even worse variant. It wouldnt be an easy decision--caught between a reluctance to coerce people to put something into their body they really dont want and infringe on their control over their body...and the conviction that if we dont get more people vaccinated were going to have a deadly fall.

But I dont have the power...so it doesnt matter what I think. (And I dont know what I would decide.) I just hope elected officials know what theyre doing.
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Post 15 Aug 2021, 10:07 am

Some doctors are getting a little frustrated with the unvaccinated...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... rs/619716/
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Post 17 Aug 2021, 10:14 am

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... -new-light
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Post 17 Aug 2021, 2:23 pm

I was suspicious from the tone of the article. The account of the Australian researcher came from Bloomberg as well. And a little more investigation explains why...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vanity ... rsythe/amp
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Post 18 Aug 2021, 5:24 am

More questions:

On Sept. 12, 2019, coronavirus bat sequences were deleted from the institute’s database. Why? It changed the security protocols for the lab. Why? It put out requests for more than $600 million for a new ventilation system. What prompted this new need? ...

The wet-market story was pushed by the Chinese CDC and the World Health Organization. Public-health leaders argued that Covid-19 was like SARS and MERS, earlier coronaviruses that emerged from bats and spread through an intermediate animal.

But neither of those viruses has ever evolved to the point where it can transmit efficiently from one human to the next. There have been fewer than 10,000 cases of each virus world-wide since SARS was discovered in 2003 and MERS in 2012. What virus comes out of a bat cave and infects humans by the millions? It’s not biologically plausible. If instead it evolved slowly over many years in nature, how come no one knew of it? ...

A Harvard study of satellite images revealed a shutdown of traffic around the Wuhan lab in the late summer and early fall of 2019. Weeks later, in late September, the hospital parking lots were filling up.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-viro ... os1&page=1

Here's the Harvard study: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/hand ... sAllowed=y

Baidu knows?
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Post 18 Aug 2021, 11:26 am

Thats what former CDC director Redfield thought--that the virus being just so ready made to be so infectious to humans that it must have come from a lab. That just doesnt happen in Nature that quickly. It takes time. And we would have known about it, right? This virus came off the line ready-made to be infectious to humans. That doesnt happen naturally. And weve never seen a virus like this before.

Redfield's quote: ""I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. And at that moment in time, the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human to human transmission. Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonotic to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient."
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Post 26 Aug 2021, 9:21 am

freeman3
Thats what former CDC director Redfield thought--that the virus being just so ready made to be so infectious to humans that it must have come from a lab. That just doesnt happen in Nature that quickly. It takes time

What virus comes out of a bat cave and infects humans by the millions?


This is bullshit. To start with the actual zoonotic transfer may have been pangolins or another animal. Its just likely to have been resevoired and originated in bats...
Remember the Spanish flu? It affected millions... More than Covid actually.
Measles is actually more infectious than covid 19....
Were they products of nature?

Once these investigations became based upon a political need... The need for Trump and Pompeo to blame someone and deflect from their own efforts, the process was poisoned.

Those involved in the previously undisclosed inquiry, which was launched last fall by allies of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, say it was an honest effort to probe what many initially dismissed: that China's biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemic's origin in Wuhan, according to two additional sources.
But the inquiry quickly became mired in internal discord amid concerns that it was part of a broader politicized effort by the Trump administration to blame China and cherry-pick facts to prove a theory.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/politics ... index.html

Senior Trump administration officials decided in the spring of 2020 to strongly imply that Covid-19 came from a Chinese lab, even though intelligence officials investigating the pandemic’s origins did not have conclusive evidence supporting that hypothesis.


https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/1 ... vid-494700

Bidens 90 investigation into the origins of covid 19 have come up empty.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58329980

That's what happens when tin pot politicians get involved in something that should have been left to dispassionate scientists.
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Post 27 Aug 2021, 8:36 am

Ricky:
Bidens 90 investigation into the origins of covid 19 have come up empty.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58329980


Inconclusive, not empty. Evidence has been destroyed. It's clear that China did not follow protocols on reporting on the Virus. They have purposefully covered up evidence. We don't know why.

Ricky:
To start with the actual zoonotic transfer may have been pangolins or another animal.


Has there been any evidence of this? Isn't it just conjecture?
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Post 27 Aug 2021, 1:20 pm

rayjay
Inconclusive, not empty. Evidence has been destroyed. It's clear that China did not follow protocols on reporting on the Virus. They have purposefully covered up evidence. We don't know why.


Which protocols are you talking about? These?
https://www.who.int/influenza/resources ... tOct15.pdf

If so, specifically what do you think wasn't followed?

The intelligence community assessed, for instance, that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon, as some Republicans had suggested last year. The report says most agencies assessed with low confidence it's unlikely Covid-19 was genetically engineered, either


Of course this has been the hype in the US, for awhile now. That there never was any evidence that Pompeo was pointing to.... that won't matter. And as soon as he perverted the truth, you had to expect China to react negatively.

rayjay

Has there been any evidence of this? Isn't it just conjecture?


It's been established that zoonotic transfer from intermediate animals is one form of transfer. The original theory, in china, was that transfer happened at the Hunan wet market....

We probably will never know definitely.
When the investigation stopped being purely scientific and became politicized by Pompeo and Trump the chance that a definitive answer would be found evaporated in ill will and suspicion.

There is no question that functionaries in the Party got involved in the original response to Covid 19. Maybe it was January 7 before they definitively said it was a new Sars Covid virus and January 11 till the full genome was released. (a 4 day delay)
But they didn't delay the Western response after that ... That was self inflicted.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/arti ... -covid-19/

Frankly when governments across the US refuse to adopt public health measure that have proven to save lives and reduce the spread of Covid - any focus on "finding blame" for the origin is BS. Its just a distraction . For the Florida governor it appears to be a way for him to promote Regeneron as a therapy rather than masks as a prevention. Rather like arguing that modern surgical techniques make survival from traffic accidents more likely so we should stop wearing uncomfortable seat belts..
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Post 27 Aug 2021, 3:15 pm

Deleted
Last edited by freeman3 on 27 Aug 2021, 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post 27 Aug 2021, 3:55 pm

"freeman3


Ricky:

Thats what former CDC director Redfield thought--that the virus being just so ready made to be so infectious to humans that it must have come from a lab. That just doesnt happen in Nature that quickly. It takes time


What virus comes out of a bat cave and infects humans by the millions?



This is bullshit. To start with the actual zoonotic transfer may have been pangolins or another animal. Its just likely to have been resevoired and originated in bats... 
Remember the Spanish flu? It affected millions... More than Covid actually. 
Measles is actually more infectious than covid 19....
Were they products of nature? 

Once these investigations became based upon a political need... The need for Trump and Pompeo to blame someone and deflect from their own efforts, the process was poisoned."

Did you actually say something there? Because I sure as heck missed it. It is actually pure conjecture that is is zoonotic transfer. And you didnt actually answer RJ's contentions. So you just say bullshit as if that is some kind of answer. Or you will say it's politicized or western governments wanting to excuse their own mistakes. Those arent actually arguments. Those are red herrings because you have nothing to answer the arguments:

1. What is your answer to the contention that this virus came out in a form that was incredibly transmissible to humans when viruses that normally come from animals to humans normally take a while to adjust to humans and SARS and MERVs were not very transmissible which was why they got contained relatively easily? And no your discussion of Spanish flu or the measles mean nothing because you didnt cite anything indicating they came from animals and quickly adapted to humans. Actually, there is evidence that Spanish Flu was around as early as 1916 but didnt TV really hit until 1918 (and did it come from a jump from animals to humans?) Again an example of a virus jumping from animals to humans and then quickly becoming hughly transmissible would be nice.

2. Why was traffic around Wuhan shut-down around the lab in late summer and early fall and hospital parking lots started to fill up in late September?

3. Why did China try to cover-up the initial outbreak and why is it not being cooperative in the investigation, as many scientists even the WHO have complained about.

4. Why were coronavirus sequences deleted from the lab. Why did it change security protocols? Why did it request a 600 million ventilation system?

These are legitimate contentions and you dont have answers for them.

Red herrings about western governments trying to deflect blame or contentions that it is a conspiracy are not substitutues for actual responses to facts pointing to the lab as a possible source.