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US Universities Are Asking Students To Report Anyone Not Following Covid Guidelines

Colleges want attendees to act as coronavirus stasi.

Published

3 years ago

on

da-kuk / Getty Images

Several universities in the US have set up systems so students can report on each other if they see anyone breaking the Covid ‘rules’.

Campus Reform notes that universities in Miami, Texas, and New Orleans have all encouraged students to play campus stasi when it comes to the Covid guidelines.

Yale has also got in on the act with a hotline, along with The University of North Georgia, whose plea for students to police each other prompted the Southeastern Legal Foundation to pen a letter warning that the system may violate students’ privacy and freedom of speech.

“Colleges have a duty to protect student health and safety, especially during uncertain times like these. However, even in unprecedented times, students’ First Amendment rights remain unchanged. That means colleges and universities cannot engage in viewpoint or content-based discrimination, cannot enact vague and overbroad policies, and cannot chill student expression,” the letter urges.

It continues, “With a Concern Form at students’ fingertips, students wishing to prevent a controversial speaker from visiting campus or to stop a student organization from garnering interest in their cause can simply report members of that organization as symptomatic. Without stricter reporting guidelines and limits, it appears that such events could be shut down entirely with the press of a button. This may sound unlikely, but then again, who would have predicted 2020 to turn out as it has?”

The SLF also warned that Fourth Amendment rights may be under threat as students could be forced to get tested for COVID-19, without probable cause.

“Under the Fourth Amendment, individuals cannot be subject to unreasonable searches and seizures. The Supreme Court has even considered that right in the context of cheek swabs. The Court has held that a criminal arrested and charged with a serious crime can be subjected to a DNA cheek swab, so long as the charges are supported by probable cause, meaning there must be sufficient likelihood that the crime occurred. However, a swab is unconstitutional if there is no probable cause, the charge is not criminal, or if the DNA is used to gather medical information about the criminal,” SLF asserted.

“Will UNG, upon receiving a report of a symptomatic student, subject that student to an invasive COVID-19 swab? Surely the university understands that this action would violate the Fourth Amendment,” the SLF further explains.

In a recent opinion piece published in the New York Times, Karen Levy, an assistant professor at Cornell University and Lauren Kilgour, a doctoral candidate at Cornell warned that universities should avoid turning students into spies, warning that while some “may feel a sense of civic duty… others may be loath to report on their friends.”

“People report on one another (truthfully or falsely) for a number of personal reasons, including competition, revenge, leverage and everyday aggravations,” the piece also notes.

“There’s every reason to assume that these motivations will bubble up in the college context, too. Students have their own loyalties, broken hearts, rocky roommate relationships and fraternity codes of silence,” Levy and Kilgour note.

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Coronavirus

Entire US Congress Votes To Declassify COVID-19 Origins Intel

Published

1 week ago

on

12 March, 2023

Zero Hedge

HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images

100% of lawmakers in the House on Friday voted to pass a bill requiring the Biden administration to declassify intelligence related to investigations into the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and Covid-19.

The Covid Origins Act of 2023, sponsored by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Braun (R-IN), passed by a vote of 410 to 0, after clearing the Senate by unanimous consent last week.

“Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across the country with almost every household feeling its effects. The United States death toll from this virus has surpassed one million people. Although concrete data is hard to lock down, millions of people are suffering from the long-term effects directly attributed to this virus. It is becoming increasingly clear that school-aged children face hurdles because of long-term school closures. The American people need to know all the aspects, including how this virus was created and specifically, whether it was a natural occurrence of the result of a lab-related event,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) in a floor speech.

Next stop, President Biden’s desk.

And while Biden has officially said he hasn’t “made that decision yet” over whether to sign it into law and release the intelligence, we can’t imagine he won’t, lest he defy the entirety of Congress.

So, what will we get? Probably what’s already known; that the FBI and the Energy Department believe with ‘moderate’ and ‘low’ confidence respectively that Covid-19 likely arose from a laboratory leak – while four other agencies and a national intelligence panel continue to believe that the pandemic was likely the result of zoonotic spillover.

Will the disclosure point to door #1 – that Dr. Anthony Fauci offshored previously-banned Gain-of-Function bat covid research in a scientific collaboration on Chinese soil where it escaped (intentionally or otherwise)?

Or door #2 – that bats from a cave 450 miles away with a strain of Covid 96.8% similar to Covid-19 infected an intermediary species, of which either (or both) emerged with Covid-19 at a Wuhan wet market across town from the aforementioned Fauci-funded lab where they were infecting ‘humanized’ mice with Covid strains? A relatively rare occurrence according to the WIV in 2018.

Or Door #3, that China went rogue, stole Peter Daszak’s crazy plans (which DARPA turned down), and started going bat-covid crazy?

What we do know is that there were ‘humanized’ mice being bred in China in mid-2019, long before the outbreak in Wuhan. As Vanity Fair noted almost two years ago – a May 2020 Chinese research paper describing mice which had lung tissue that approximated a human’s (via National Review):

Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?

And as journalist Josh Rogin wrote in Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century (again, via National Review):

After consultations with experts, some U.S. officials came to believe that this Beijing lab was likely conducting coronavirus experiments on mice fitted with ACE2 receptors well before the coronavirus outbreak — research they hadn’t disclosed and continued to not admit to. That, by itself, did not help to explain how SARS-CoV-2 originated. But it did make clear to U.S. officials that there was a lot of risky coronavirus experiments going on in Chinese labs that the rest of the world was simply not aware of. “This was just a peek under a curtain of an entire galaxy of activity, including labs in Beijing and Wuhan playing around with coronaviruses in ACE2 mice in unsafe labs,” the senior administration official said. “It suggests we’re getting a peek at a body of activity that isn’t understood in the West or even has precedent here.”

And how much of that was done with knowledge, funding or collaboration from entities outside of China?

China contacted Hawley’s office on Wednesday to object to the bill, telling him that its only purpose is to “politicize and stigmatize China.”

“The move by the U.S. Congress just shows that the U.S. is going further and further down the wrong path of political manipulation. The so-called traceability report by the U.S. intelligence agency is an attempt to ‘presume guilt’ on China. It is an attempt to shift the blame from its own failure to fight the epidemic to China,” wrote government attorney Li Xiang.

Does Congress ever do things unanimously?

This post was originally published at Zero Hedge

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Video: Fauci DEFENDS Gain Of Function, Mocks Lab Leak Censorship

“The whole scientific community feels that you have to have some degree of being able to manipulate organisms”

Published

2 weeks ago

on

10 March, 2023

Steve Watson

Screenshot

In a remarkable interview Thursday, Anthony Fauci had the gall to defend dangerous gain of function research, which in all likelihood was the direct cause of the COVID pandemic, and mocked the idea that a lab leak is being covered up.

Appearing on Fox News, Fauci told anchor Neil Cavuto “If you shut off all gain of function research. Did you get the flu shot this year, Neil? If you did, and you got it from an influenza vaccine, that was gain-of-function that made that influenza vaccine. That’s what people don’t understand.”

Fauci twice suggested that he should be “taken out of this,” reasoning that “I’m a charged person,” and went on to argue the case for gain of function research, which makes pathogens more deadly.

“The whole scientific community feels that you have to have some degree of being able to manipulate organisms,” Fauci claimed, adding “When you do it, you have to do it carefully and under very controlled conditions.”

All the while, Fauci was again careful not to define exactly what gain of function is, having previously changed the definition to cover his own culpability.

When asked if the research serves any value, Fauci stated “It depends on what your definition of gain of function is,” going on to say “Look at a whole array of virologists and scientists who do research that is absolutely critical for the health of the country. Some of that involves manipulating organisms. You want to call it gain of function. It really is not, in many respects, but it needs to be very well-regulated.”

Fauci also mocked the idea that discussion of a potential Wuhan coronavirus lab leak was dismissed and suppressed, after Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, suggested that Fauci bribed scientists into silence on the matter with a $9 million grant.

Jordan was referring to testimony earlier this month by Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins, who charged that two scientists who believed that COVID-19 leaked from a lab changed their minds after receiving the $9 million grant from Fauci.

“I almost have to laugh at that, Neil. That’s totally bizarre,” Fauci responded, going on to explain “First of all, I wasn’t leaning totally strongly one way or the other. I’ve always kept an open mind. As the data evolved and evolutionary virologists looked at the data, it looked more likely it was a natural occurrence from an animal reservoir.”

“I have always kept a completely open mind that it could be one or the other. Quite frankly, the evidence weighs more likely towards one, namely a natural occurrence,” Fauci claimed.

“The other absolutely preposterous thing that Jim Jordan said was that we gave the investigators $9 million bribe to change their mind. Is he kidding me?” Fauci further stated.

He continued, “They put in a grant about a year and a half before this all happened. The grant was reviewed by a peer review and put before an independent council and approved before the meeting even took place.”

“So to assume that they were getting a $9 million grant because of the fact that we tried to get them to change their mind is beyond ludicrous. Beyond ludicrous,” Fauci asserted.

Earlier this week, Senator Rand Paul accused Fauci, along with other scientists working with him at the National Institutes Of Health of engaging in an “elaborate cover-up” of the lab origin of the coronavirus pandemic in order to hide their own involvement.

Video: Rand Paul Accuses Fauci Of “Elaborate Cover-up” Of COVID Lab Leak

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    Govern Me Harder, Daddy!

    The most enthusiastic bootlickers.

    Published

    2 weeks ago

    on

    9 March, 2023

    The biggest age group to think the government wasn’t *authoritarian enough* during lockdown is young people aged 18-24.

    What the hell has happened to the ‘rebellious’ youth? They’re all bootlickers now.

    Please share this video! https://youtu.be/RTiGO9OqbPM

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