• =?UTF-8?B?IOKAmEl04oCZcyBhIHRzdW5hbWnigJk6IExlZ2FsIGNoYWxsZW5nZXMg?= =?

    From Michael Ejercito@21:1/5 to All on Tue May 10 08:21:06 2022
    XPost: alt.bible.prophecy, soc.culture.usa, soc.culture.israel

    http://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/10/legal-challenges-cdc-public-health-policy-00031253


    ‘It’s a tsunami’: Legal challenges threatening public health policy
    Court battles over Covid-19 safety measures and recent court rulings
    will impact the government’s ability to keep Americans safe, experts warn.

    NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 19: A mask is seen on the ground at John F.
    Kennedy Airport on April 19, 2022 in New York City. On Monday, a federal
    judge in Florida struck down the mask mandate for airports and other
    methods of public transportation as a new COVID variant is on the rise
    across parts of the United States. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
    In April, a federal judge in Florida struck down the mask mandate for
    airports and other methods of public transportation as a new COVID
    variant is on the rise across parts of the United States. | Spencer
    Platt/Getty Images

    By KRISTA MAHR

    05/10/2022 04:30 AM EDT

    Mounting legal challenges to pandemic public health rules — and judges’ increasing willingness to overrule medical experts — threaten to erode
    the influence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
    other government health authorities.

    In the last year, four court rulings against the CDC, including one from
    the Supreme Court, have forced the agency to stop or change its pandemic mitigation orders. Most recently, a Florida district judge ordered a
    national injunction ending the agency’s mask mandate on public transport.


    “Litigation invites litigation invites litigation,” said Wendy Parmet, faculty co-director at the Center for Health Policy and Law at
    Northeastern University. It’s a cycle that “creates enormous uncertainty about what CDC could do going forward should the pandemic worsen again,
    or should another pandemic or even a more regional outbreak arise.”


    The high-profile challenges to the CDC sit atop thousands more lawsuits
    against state and local health authorities that have been filed during
    the pandemic, experts say, seeking to end localized social distancing
    and mask orders, vaccine mandates and business closures.

    The constant threat of being dragged into court is having a chilling
    effect on local health officials that may last well beyond the Covid-19
    crisis, leading health commissioners or board of health members to think
    twice about enacting public safety measures.

    “It’s a tsunami,” says James Hodge, a law professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “Anything that limits you as an American from doing something you don’t want to do … It all
    got a challenge.”

    The flood of legal challenges is part of a profound antagonism many in
    the U.S. have felt toward public health officials since the early days
    of the pandemic, when the rapid spread of Covid-19 put government
    authority and America’s fierce defense of individual freedoms on a
    collision course.

    A sign on a door asks people to wear masks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
    CDC strategy on masks could haunt the country
    BY RACHAEL LEVY
    Political meddling in the CDC’s Covid-19 response and the agency’s own unforced errors in testing and communication stiffened many Americans’ resistance to the government’s involvement in their personal health,
    even as nearly one million Americans have died. In addition to lawsuits,
    bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the nation to
    limit public health authorities’ power, and scores of public health
    officials have left their jobs in frustration.



    Every stage of the crisis has brought a new challenge to public health
    workers.

    In Massachusetts, public health officials fended off a stream of
    lawsuits in the early days of the pandemic, getting in the way of work
    like finding shelters for homeless Covid-positive residents. In Ohio,
    the state legislature passed a bill in 2021 to allow lawmakers to
    override the governor’s health orders or emergency declarations. And in Washington, one of the last states to end its indoor mask order in
    March, local public health officials worried about trying to enforce
    future regional orders on their own, if cases rose again in their community.

    “Health authorities need to know that they can’t run amok. Judicial
    review is an important deterrent against overreach and abuse,” says Parmet.

    “On the other hand, you don’t want judicial review to be so threatening, and so omnipresent… that when a health emergency arises, officials are paralyzed by fear of litigation, and they’re so worried about what the
    court will do, when their lawyers are saying, ‘You can’t do this and you can’t do that’… Then you get into a situation where lives will be in danger.”

    Future authority
    Threats to the CDC’s authority came into focus in April when a federal
    judge in Florida ruled the agency did not have the authority to order a national mask mandate on public transportation and issued a nationwide injunction against the order.

    The ruling from the judge, a Trump appointee who the American Bar
    Association deemed was “not qualified” when she was nominated for the bench, came as national Covid-19 cases were rising, and prompted a
    cascade of private transportation companies to lift their own
    requirements on facial coverings.

    The Department of Justice appealed the ruling in the 11th Circuit Court
    of Appeals, in part to protect the CDC’s authority to issue similar
    orders in the future. On May 3, the mandate ran out anyway, and the CDC recommended that people continue to mask up on planes, trains and buses.

    MOST READ
    Screenshot 2022-05-03 123921.jpg
    Read Justice Alito’s initial draft abortion opinion which would overturn
    Roe v. Wade
    The Real Origins of the Religious Right
    Exclusive: Madison Cawthorn photos reveal him wearing women’s lingerie
    in public setting
    8 Democrats defect on $15 minimum wage hike
    Why Did Obama Free This Terrorist?

    Since then, another federal judge in Florida reached the opposite
    conclusion, saying the CDC was within its power to order the mandate. In
    Texas, yet another challenge to the defunct requirement is still pending.

    The 11th Circuit has weighed in on the CDC’s pandemic authorities
    before. In July, it upheld a lower Florida court order prohibiting the
    agency from imposing Covid-19 restrictions on cruise ships in the state.
    The next month, the Supreme Court rejected the CDC’s pandemic-related eviction moratorium, ruling the agency did not have the authority to
    impose it.

    Other federal agencies that watch over Americans’ health have also come
    into the courts’ crosshairs. In January, the Supreme Court struck down
    an order by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that
    mandated employees in businesses with over 100 workers be vaccinated or
    tested, though it upheld the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ vaccine mandate for workers in Medicare and Medicaid participating
    facilities. The court is also considering a case that could limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate air pollution,
    among other things.

    Many of these decisions fit a worrying pattern, public health experts
    said, in which judges do not appear to be taking scientific evidence or expertise on board.

    “Historically, there’s been some level of deference to experts who are using their legal authority to save lives,” said Joshua Sharfstein,
    professor of the practice in health policy and management at Johns
    Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “But that has been eroding.
    The courts have increasingly not really cared to assess the implications
    of the decisions for health.”

    At the local level, state and local public health agencies have won most
    of the challenges to their authority, says Hodge of ASU, who provides
    legal guidance to public health agencies and others through The Network
    for Public Health Law, an expert entity that helps organizations
    navigate laws and regulations.

    But after vaccines were introduced, some courts started to ask
    authorities more questions on why mitigation measures are necessary, he
    said.



    Courts have also intervened over Title 42, the CDC order stopping
    migrants from entering the U.S. immigration system in order to prevent
    the spread of Covid-19. The policy has drawn the ire of judges and
    critics, who have said it is a legitimate public health rule that has
    been politicized in both the Trump and Biden administrations.

    Since it was enacted under Trump in March 2020, public health experts
    say the order is an ineffective way to prevent transmission of the
    virus, and immigration advocates say it violates international
    humanitarian law by turning away asylum seekers fleeing danger at the
    border.

    A U.S. Border Patrol agent instructs immigrant families as they prepare
    to board transport to a processing center after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
    WHITE HOUSE

    Biden to comply with forthcoming order to keep Covid border restrictions
    in place
    BY EUGENE DANIELS AND LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ
    Some courts have been sympathetic with those perspectives. On March 4, a
    D.C. Circuit Court judge questioned what, if any, public health purpose
    the policy serves at this stage in the pandemic and ruled that the CDC
    did not have the authority to send families back to danger without
    giving them the chance to apply for protection against persecution and
    torture.

    Others have sided with states seeking to keep the order in place as an immigration-control measure. Not long after the D.C. Circuit Court
    ruling, the CDC said it would end the order for all migrants on May 23.
    That effort is being challenged in a Louisiana court by states worried
    about the surge in migrants that its end could bring. A federal judge
    issued a temporary restraining order preventing the CDC from phasing out
    the order before then and could soon seek to stop the administration
    from ending it altogether.

    “It’s dangerous to start manipulating the public health laws,” says Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney representing the families in the case in D.C.
    Circuit Court. “At this point, there’s no longer even the pretense that Title 42 is needed for public health; it’s being discussed openly as a border-control measure.”

    Landscape of ‘anger and vehemence’
    In Washington state, Secretary of Health Umair Shah says this litigious atmosphere, and particularly a decision like the Florida injunction
    against the CDC’s travel mask mandate, “has ramifications for public
    health policy across the nation.”

    He says it’s part of a broader landscape of “anger and vehemence”
    against public health officials and public health policies that is
    making it harder for them to do their jobs.


    “I know that those things — everything together — has had an impact on people,” said Shah. “It may not have changed necessarily what they’re doing, but it may have changed how they’ve gone about it, or how public they’ve been, or how careful they’ve been, because nobody wants to have that onslaught launched against them.”

    In Massachusetts, having to constantly fend off lawsuit threats was a “complete time suck” in the early days of the pandemic, recalls Cheryl Sbarra, executive director and senior staff attorney at the
    Massachusetts Association of Health Boards.

    Sbarra, who provides legal guidance to health boards across the state,
    says two years later, the threats have not stopped. Board meetings are
    more contentious. There’s more “bashing.” People wearing masks during
    the latest rise in Covid cases are harassed.

    “It’s not as hot as it was, but there’s still a lingering feeling with some people that we violated their rights,” Sbarra said. “And I don’t know if that’s ever going to go away.”

    --
    This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
    https://www.avg.com

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From HeartDoc Andrew@21:1/5 to Michael Ejercito on Tue May 10 12:16:58 2022
    XPost: alt.bible.prophecy, soc.culture.usa, soc.culture.israel
    XPost: talk.politics.guns

    Michael Ejercito wrote:

    http://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/10/legal-challenges-cdc-public-health-policy-00031253


    Its a tsunami: Legal challenges threatening public health policy
    Court battles over Covid-19 safety measures and recent court rulings
    will impact the governments ability to keep Americans safe, experts warn.

    NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 19: A mask is seen on the ground at John F.
    Kennedy Airport on April 19, 2022 in New York City. On Monday, a federal >judge in Florida struck down the mask mandate for airports and other
    methods of public transportation as a new COVID variant is on the rise
    across parts of the United States. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
    In April, a federal judge in Florida struck down the mask mandate for >airports and other methods of public transportation as a new COVID
    variant is on the rise across parts of the United States. | Spencer >Platt/Getty Images

    By KRISTA MAHR

    05/10/2022 04:30 AM EDT

    Mounting legal challenges to pandemic public health rules and judges >increasing willingness to overrule medical experts threaten to erode
    the influence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
    other government health authorities.

    In the last year, four court rulings against the CDC, including one from
    the Supreme Court, have forced the agency to stop or change its pandemic >mitigation orders. Most recently, a Florida district judge ordered a
    national injunction ending the agencys mask mandate on public transport.


    Litigation invites litigation invites litigation, said Wendy Parmet, >faculty co-director at the Center for Health Policy and Law at
    Northeastern University. Its a cycle that creates enormous uncertainty >about what CDC could do going forward should the pandemic worsen again,
    or should another pandemic or even a more regional outbreak arise.


    The high-profile challenges to the CDC sit atop thousands more lawsuits >against state and local health authorities that have been filed during
    the pandemic, experts say, seeking to end localized social distancing
    and mask orders, vaccine mandates and business closures.

    The constant threat of being dragged into court is having a chilling
    effect on local health officials that may last well beyond the Covid-19 >crisis, leading health commissioners or board of health members to think >twice about enacting public safety measures.

    Its a tsunami, says James Hodge, a law professor at Arizona State >Universitys Sandra Day OConnor College of Law. Anything that limits
    you as an American from doing something you dont want to do It all
    got a challenge.

    The flood of legal challenges is part of a profound antagonism many in
    the U.S. have felt toward public health officials since the early days
    of the pandemic, when the rapid spread of Covid-19 put government
    authority and Americas fierce defense of individual freedoms on a
    collision course.

    A sign on a door asks people to wear masks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
    CDC strategy on masks could haunt the country
    BY RACHAEL LEVY
    Political meddling in the CDCs Covid-19 response and the agencys own >unforced errors in testing and communication stiffened many Americans >resistance to the governments involvement in their personal health,
    even as nearly one million Americans have died. In addition to lawsuits, >bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the nation to
    limit public health authorities power, and scores of public health
    officials have left their jobs in frustration.



    Every stage of the crisis has brought a new challenge to public health >workers.

    In Massachusetts, public health officials fended off a stream of
    lawsuits in the early days of the pandemic, getting in the way of work
    like finding shelters for homeless Covid-positive residents. In Ohio,
    the state legislature passed a bill in 2021 to allow lawmakers to
    override the governors health orders or emergency declarations. And in >Washington, one of the last states to end its indoor mask order in
    March, local public health officials worried about trying to enforce
    future regional orders on their own, if cases rose again in their community.

    Health authorities need to know that they cant run amok. Judicial
    review is an important deterrent against overreach and abuse, says Parmet.

    On the other hand, you dont want judicial review to be so threatening,
    and so omnipresent that when a health emergency arises, officials are >paralyzed by fear of litigation, and theyre so worried about what the
    court will do, when their lawyers are saying, You cant do this and you >cant do that Then you get into a situation where lives will be in
    danger.

    Future authority
    Threats to the CDCs authority came into focus in April when a federal
    judge in Florida ruled the agency did not have the authority to order a >national mask mandate on public transportation and issued a nationwide >injunction against the order.

    The ruling from the judge, a Trump appointee who the American Bar
    Association deemed was not qualified when she was nominated for the
    bench, came as national Covid-19 cases were rising, and prompted a
    cascade of private transportation companies to lift their own
    requirements on facial coverings.

    The Department of Justice appealed the ruling in the 11th Circuit Court
    of Appeals, in part to protect the CDCs authority to issue similar
    orders in the future. On May 3, the mandate ran out anyway, and the CDC >recommended that people continue to mask up on planes, trains and buses.

    MOST READ
    Screenshot 2022-05-03 123921.jpg
    Read Justice Alitos initial draft abortion opinion which would overturn
    Roe v. Wade
    The Real Origins of the Religious Right
    Exclusive: Madison Cawthorn photos reveal him wearing womens lingerie
    in public setting
    8 Democrats defect on $15 minimum wage hike
    Why Did Obama Free This Terrorist?

    Since then, another federal judge in Florida reached the opposite
    conclusion, saying the CDC was within its power to order the mandate. In >Texas, yet another challenge to the defunct requirement is still pending.

    The 11th Circuit has weighed in on the CDCs pandemic authorities
    before. In July, it upheld a lower Florida court order prohibiting the
    agency from imposing Covid-19 restrictions on cruise ships in the state.
    The next month, the Supreme Court rejected the CDCs pandemic-related >eviction moratorium, ruling the agency did not have the authority to
    impose it.

    Other federal agencies that watch over Americans health have also come
    into the courts crosshairs. In January, the Supreme Court struck down
    an order by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that
    mandated employees in businesses with over 100 workers be vaccinated or >tested, though it upheld the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services >vaccine mandate for workers in Medicare and Medicaid participating >facilities. The court is also considering a case that could limit the >Environmental Protection Agencys ability to regulate air pollution,
    among other things.

    Many of these decisions fit a worrying pattern, public health experts
    said, in which judges do not appear to be taking scientific evidence or >expertise on board.

    Historically, theres been some level of deference to experts who are
    using their legal authority to save lives, said Joshua Sharfstein,
    professor of the practice in health policy and management at Johns
    Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But that has been eroding.
    The courts have increasingly not really cared to assess the implications
    of the decisions for health.

    At the local level, state and local public health agencies have won most
    of the challenges to their authority, says Hodge of ASU, who provides
    legal guidance to public health agencies and others through The Network
    for Public Health Law, an expert entity that helps organizations
    navigate laws and regulations.

    But after vaccines were introduced, some courts started to ask
    authorities more questions on why mitigation measures are necessary, he
    said.



    Courts have also intervened over Title 42, the CDC order stopping
    migrants from entering the U.S. immigration system in order to prevent
    the spread of Covid-19. The policy has drawn the ire of judges and
    critics, who have said it is a legitimate public health rule that has
    been politicized in both the Trump and Biden administrations.

    Since it was enacted under Trump in March 2020, public health experts
    say the order is an ineffective way to prevent transmission of the
    virus, and immigration advocates say it violates international
    humanitarian law by turning away asylum seekers fleeing danger at the
    border.

    A U.S. Border Patrol agent instructs immigrant families as they prepare
    to board transport to a processing center after crossing the U.S.-Mexico >border.
    WHITE HOUSE

    Biden to comply with forthcoming order to keep Covid border restrictions
    in place
    BY EUGENE DANIELS AND LAURA BARRN-LPEZ
    Some courts have been sympathetic with those perspectives. On March 4, a
    D.C. Circuit Court judge questioned what, if any, public health purpose
    the policy serves at this stage in the pandemic and ruled that the CDC
    did not have the authority to send families back to danger without
    giving them the chance to apply for protection against persecution and >torture.

    Others have sided with states seeking to keep the order in place as an >immigration-control measure. Not long after the D.C. Circuit Court
    ruling, the CDC said it would end the order for all migrants on May 23.
    That effort is being challenged in a Louisiana court by states worried
    about the surge in migrants that its end could bring. A federal judge
    issued a temporary restraining order preventing the CDC from phasing out
    the order before then and could soon seek to stop the administration
    from ending it altogether.

    Its dangerous to start manipulating the public health laws, says Lee >Gelernt, an ACLU attorney representing the families in the case in D.C. >Circuit Court. At this point, theres no longer even the pretense that
    Title 42 is needed for public health; its being discussed openly as a >border-control measure.

    Landscape of anger and vehemence
    In Washington state, Secretary of Health Umair Shah says this litigious >atmosphere, and particularly a decision like the Florida injunction
    against the CDCs travel mask mandate, has ramifications for public
    health policy across the nation.

    He says its part of a broader landscape of anger and vehemence
    against public health officials and public health policies that is
    making it harder for them to do their jobs.


    I know that those things everything together has had an impact on >people, said Shah. It may not have changed necessarily what theyre
    doing, but it may have changed how theyve gone about it, or how public >theyve been, or how careful theyve been, because nobody wants to have
    that onslaught launched against them.

    In Massachusetts, having to constantly fend off lawsuit threats was a >complete time suck in the early days of the pandemic, recalls Cheryl >Sbarra, executive director and senior staff attorney at the
    Massachusetts Association of Health Boards.

    Sbarra, who provides legal guidance to health boards across the state,
    says two years later, the threats have not stopped. Board meetings are
    more contentious. Theres more bashing. People wearing masks during
    the latest rise in Covid cases are harassed.

    Its not as hot as it was, but theres still a lingering feeling with
    some people that we violated their rights, Sbarra said. And I dont
    know if thats ever going to go away.

    The only *healthy* way to stop the pandemic, thereby saving lives, in
    the U.S. & elsewhere is by rapidly ( http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 )
    finding out at any given moment, including even while on-line, who
    among us are unwittingly contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or
    asymptomatic) in order to http://tinyurl.com/ConvinceItForward (John
    15:12) for them to call their doctor and self-quarantine per their
    doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic. Thus, we're hoping for the
    best while preparing for the worse-case scenario of the Alpha lineage
    mutations and others like the Omicron, Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota,
    Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations combining via
    slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like
    http://tinyurl.com/Deltamicron that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no longer effective.

    Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( http://tinyurl.com/RapidOmicronTest
    ) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.

    So how are you ?









    ...because we mindfully choose to openly care with our heart,

    HeartDoc Andrew <><
    --
    Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
    Cardiologist with an http://bit.ly/EternalMedicalLicense
    2024 & upwards non-partisan candidate for U.S. President: http://WonderfullyHungry.org
    and author of the 2PD-OMER Approach:
    http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrewCare
    which is the only **healthy** cure for the U.S. healthcare crisis

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Michael Ejercito@21:1/5 to HeartDoc Andrew on Wed May 11 21:20:53 2022
    XPost: alt.bible.prophecy, soc.culture.usa, soc.culture.israel
    XPost: talk.politics.guns

    HeartDoc Andrew wrote:
    Michael Ejercito wrote:

    http://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/10/legal-challenges-cdc-public-health-policy-00031253


    ‘It’s a tsunami’: Legal challenges threatening public health policy
    Court battles over Covid-19 safety measures and recent court rulings
    will impact the government’s ability to keep Americans safe, experts warn. >>
    NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 19: A mask is seen on the ground at John F.
    Kennedy Airport on April 19, 2022 in New York City. On Monday, a federal
    judge in Florida struck down the mask mandate for airports and other
    methods of public transportation as a new COVID variant is on the rise
    across parts of the United States. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
    In April, a federal judge in Florida struck down the mask mandate for
    airports and other methods of public transportation as a new COVID
    variant is on the rise across parts of the United States. | Spencer
    Platt/Getty Images

    By KRISTA MAHR

    05/10/2022 04:30 AM EDT

    Mounting legal challenges to pandemic public health rules — and judges’ >> increasing willingness to overrule medical experts — threaten to erode
    the influence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
    other government health authorities.

    In the last year, four court rulings against the CDC, including one from
    the Supreme Court, have forced the agency to stop or change its pandemic
    mitigation orders. Most recently, a Florida district judge ordered a
    national injunction ending the agency’s mask mandate on public transport. >>

    “Litigation invites litigation invites litigation,” said Wendy Parmet, >> faculty co-director at the Center for Health Policy and Law at
    Northeastern University. It’s a cycle that “creates enormous uncertainty >> about what CDC could do going forward should the pandemic worsen again,
    or should another pandemic or even a more regional outbreak arise.”


    The high-profile challenges to the CDC sit atop thousands more lawsuits
    against state and local health authorities that have been filed during
    the pandemic, experts say, seeking to end localized social distancing
    and mask orders, vaccine mandates and business closures.

    The constant threat of being dragged into court is having a chilling
    effect on local health officials that may last well beyond the Covid-19
    crisis, leading health commissioners or board of health members to think
    twice about enacting public safety measures.

    “It’s a tsunami,” says James Hodge, a law professor at Arizona State >> University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “Anything that limits >> you as an American from doing something you don’t want to do … It all
    got a challenge.”

    The flood of legal challenges is part of a profound antagonism many in
    the U.S. have felt toward public health officials since the early days
    of the pandemic, when the rapid spread of Covid-19 put government
    authority and America’s fierce defense of individual freedoms on a
    collision course.

    A sign on a door asks people to wear masks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
    CDC strategy on masks could haunt the country
    BY RACHAEL LEVY
    Political meddling in the CDC’s Covid-19 response and the agency’s own >> unforced errors in testing and communication stiffened many Americans’
    resistance to the government’s involvement in their personal health,
    even as nearly one million Americans have died. In addition to lawsuits,
    bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the nation to
    limit public health authorities’ power, and scores of public health
    officials have left their jobs in frustration.



    Every stage of the crisis has brought a new challenge to public health
    workers.

    In Massachusetts, public health officials fended off a stream of
    lawsuits in the early days of the pandemic, getting in the way of work
    like finding shelters for homeless Covid-positive residents. In Ohio,
    the state legislature passed a bill in 2021 to allow lawmakers to
    override the governor’s health orders or emergency declarations. And in
    Washington, one of the last states to end its indoor mask order in
    March, local public health officials worried about trying to enforce
    future regional orders on their own, if cases rose again in their community. >>
    “Health authorities need to know that they can’t run amok. Judicial
    review is an important deterrent against overreach and abuse,” says Parmet.

    “On the other hand, you don’t want judicial review to be so threatening, >> and so omnipresent… that when a health emergency arises, officials are
    paralyzed by fear of litigation, and they’re so worried about what the
    court will do, when their lawyers are saying, ‘You can’t do this and you >> can’t do that’… Then you get into a situation where lives will be in >> danger.”

    Future authority
    Threats to the CDC’s authority came into focus in April when a federal
    judge in Florida ruled the agency did not have the authority to order a
    national mask mandate on public transportation and issued a nationwide
    injunction against the order.

    The ruling from the judge, a Trump appointee who the American Bar
    Association deemed was “not qualified” when she was nominated for the
    bench, came as national Covid-19 cases were rising, and prompted a
    cascade of private transportation companies to lift their own
    requirements on facial coverings.

    The Department of Justice appealed the ruling in the 11th Circuit Court
    of Appeals, in part to protect the CDC’s authority to issue similar
    orders in the future. On May 3, the mandate ran out anyway, and the CDC
    recommended that people continue to mask up on planes, trains and buses.

    MOST READ
    Screenshot 2022-05-03 123921.jpg
    Read Justice Alito’s initial draft abortion opinion which would overturn >> Roe v. Wade
    The Real Origins of the Religious Right
    Exclusive: Madison Cawthorn photos reveal him wearing women’s lingerie
    in public setting
    8 Democrats defect on $15 minimum wage hike
    Why Did Obama Free This Terrorist?

    Since then, another federal judge in Florida reached the opposite
    conclusion, saying the CDC was within its power to order the mandate. In
    Texas, yet another challenge to the defunct requirement is still pending.

    The 11th Circuit has weighed in on the CDC’s pandemic authorities
    before. In July, it upheld a lower Florida court order prohibiting the
    agency from imposing Covid-19 restrictions on cruise ships in the state.
    The next month, the Supreme Court rejected the CDC’s pandemic-related
    eviction moratorium, ruling the agency did not have the authority to
    impose it.

    Other federal agencies that watch over Americans’ health have also come
    into the courts’ crosshairs. In January, the Supreme Court struck down
    an order by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that
    mandated employees in businesses with over 100 workers be vaccinated or
    tested, though it upheld the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’
    vaccine mandate for workers in Medicare and Medicaid participating
    facilities. The court is also considering a case that could limit the
    Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate air pollution,
    among other things.

    Many of these decisions fit a worrying pattern, public health experts
    said, in which judges do not appear to be taking scientific evidence or
    expertise on board.

    “Historically, there’s been some level of deference to experts who are >> using their legal authority to save lives,” said Joshua Sharfstein,
    professor of the practice in health policy and management at Johns
    Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “But that has been eroding.
    The courts have increasingly not really cared to assess the implications
    of the decisions for health.”

    At the local level, state and local public health agencies have won most
    of the challenges to their authority, says Hodge of ASU, who provides
    legal guidance to public health agencies and others through The Network
    for Public Health Law, an expert entity that helps organizations
    navigate laws and regulations.

    But after vaccines were introduced, some courts started to ask
    authorities more questions on why mitigation measures are necessary, he
    said.



    Courts have also intervened over Title 42, the CDC order stopping
    migrants from entering the U.S. immigration system in order to prevent
    the spread of Covid-19. The policy has drawn the ire of judges and
    critics, who have said it is a legitimate public health rule that has
    been politicized in both the Trump and Biden administrations.

    Since it was enacted under Trump in March 2020, public health experts
    say the order is an ineffective way to prevent transmission of the
    virus, and immigration advocates say it violates international
    humanitarian law by turning away asylum seekers fleeing danger at the
    border.

    A U.S. Border Patrol agent instructs immigrant families as they prepare
    to board transport to a processing center after crossing the U.S.-Mexico
    border.
    WHITE HOUSE

    Biden to comply with forthcoming order to keep Covid border restrictions
    in place
    BY EUGENE DANIELS AND LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ
    Some courts have been sympathetic with those perspectives. On March 4, a
    D.C. Circuit Court judge questioned what, if any, public health purpose
    the policy serves at this stage in the pandemic and ruled that the CDC
    did not have the authority to send families back to danger without
    giving them the chance to apply for protection against persecution and
    torture.

    Others have sided with states seeking to keep the order in place as an
    immigration-control measure. Not long after the D.C. Circuit Court
    ruling, the CDC said it would end the order for all migrants on May 23.
    That effort is being challenged in a Louisiana court by states worried
    about the surge in migrants that its end could bring. A federal judge
    issued a temporary restraining order preventing the CDC from phasing out
    the order before then and could soon seek to stop the administration
    from ending it altogether.

    “It’s dangerous to start manipulating the public health laws,” says Lee
    Gelernt, an ACLU attorney representing the families in the case in D.C.
    Circuit Court. “At this point, there’s no longer even the pretense that >> Title 42 is needed for public health; it’s being discussed openly as a
    border-control measure.”

    Landscape of ‘anger and vehemence’
    In Washington state, Secretary of Health Umair Shah says this litigious
    atmosphere, and particularly a decision like the Florida injunction
    against the CDC’s travel mask mandate, “has ramifications for public
    health policy across the nation.”

    He says it’s part of a broader landscape of “anger and vehemence”
    against public health officials and public health policies that is
    making it harder for them to do their jobs.


    “I know that those things — everything together — has had an impact on >> people,” said Shah. “It may not have changed necessarily what they’re >> doing, but it may have changed how they’ve gone about it, or how public
    they’ve been, or how careful they’ve been, because nobody wants to have >> that onslaught launched against them.”

    In Massachusetts, having to constantly fend off lawsuit threats was a
    “complete time suck” in the early days of the pandemic, recalls Cheryl >> Sbarra, executive director and senior staff attorney at the
    Massachusetts Association of Health Boards.

    Sbarra, who provides legal guidance to health boards across the state,
    says two years later, the threats have not stopped. Board meetings are
    more contentious. There’s more “bashing.” People wearing masks during >> the latest rise in Covid cases are harassed.

    “It’s not as hot as it was, but there’s still a lingering feeling with >> some people that we violated their rights,” Sbarra said. “And I don’t >> know if that’s ever going to go away.”

    The only *healthy* way to stop the pandemic, thereby saving lives, in
    the U.S. & elsewhere is by rapidly ( http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 ) finding out at any given moment, including even while on-line, who
    among us are unwittingly contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or
    asymptomatic) in order to http://tinyurl.com/ConvinceItForward (John
    15:12) for them to call their doctor and self-quarantine per their
    doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic. Thus, we're hoping for the
    best while preparing for the worse-case scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron, Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota,
    Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations combining via
    slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like
    http://tinyurl.com/Deltamicron that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no longer effective.

    Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( http://tinyurl.com/RapidOmicronTest
    ) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.

    So how are you ?

    I am wonderfully hungry!


    Michael

    --
    This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
    https://www.avg.com

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)