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Horowitz: The biggest COVID lie right now: No immunity from prior infection

How much longer will the government get away with denying the science?

Why should the estimated one-third of Americans who have already contracted the virus still be treated like ticking time bombs? How much longer will the government get away with denying the science behind immunity from infection?

The isolation of all human beings as a strategy to deal with this virus began with the novel assumption of mass asymptomatic spread, a hypothesis now disproven by studies on transmission. Now, the mandatory masking and isolation are continuing without question based on a shocking lie that the one-third of the country who have already gotten the virus – despite the masks and lockdowns, by the way – are not immune to the virus.

As more and more studies have come out showing that prior infection confers long-lasting immunity – not just the 90 days we are told by the government – the purveyors of panic and tyranny have sought to use the focus on several supposedly new variants to deny the presumed immunity from prior infection. However, a new comprehensive study from Harvard Medical School and Boston University researchers should put this latest myth to rest.

The researchers took blood samples from people who had the virus from March 3 to April 1, 2020, long before the new variants were discovered, which allowed them to presume they all had the original Wuhan strain. They found the S-specific memory B cells “conferring robustness against emerging SARS-CoV2 variants” – the U.K. (B117) & South African (B1351) variants.

“Loss of protection against overt or severe disease is not an inevitable consequence of a waning serum antibody titer,” wrote the authors. “This atlas of B cell memory therefore maps systematically a crucial component of the long-term immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

In other words, the inherent immune system full of B cells (in addition to T cells) provides robust immunity not just long after the antibody titers wane from the original infection, but also against emerging strains of the virus.

There has been much discussion over whether the vaccine confers immunity against the new variants, but the more important fact is that previous infection confers such immunity, as is the case with nearly every virus. Indeed, cases have plummeted in South Africa and England precisely since the new variants have been discovered, which would be difficult without natural immunity from the prior waves working against the new variants.

In Denmark, the U.K. variant composes roughly three-quarters of all cases, yet the country is averaging one death per day over the past 7 days. The same holds true for a number of states in America.

A retrospective observational study of 14,840 COVID-19 survivors in Austria found just a 0.27% reinfection rate during the second wave. “Protection against SARS-CoV-2 after natural infection is comparable to the highest available estimates on vaccine efficacies,” concludes the study, published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation.

It’s also important to remember that, as with other viruses, immunity doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t test positive again, but that you won’t experience serious symptoms even if you do. The goal is not to prevent colds and flus, but to pre-empt serious illness and death. “With follow‐up on mortality available until December 23, only one 72‐year‐old woman died two days after her tentative re‐infection diagnosis,” observed the authors of the Austrian study. “She was not hospitalized and according to her medical records her cause of death (‘acute vascular occlusion of an extremity with rhabdomyolysis’) was not causally attributed to COVID‐19.”

As the Los Angeles Times reported already in February, with an estimated 35% of Americans already infected (up to 50% in Los Angeles!), “the biggest factor” driving the plummeting of cases “paradoxically, is something the nation spent the last year trying to prevent.” That is herd immunity. As illogical as it was to lock down all Americans last year, regardless of whether they were sick, it’s downright insane to continue masking people who already had the virus AND have no current symptoms.

We’ve already learned from reams of medical research that asymptomatic individuals rarely drive outbreaks. Coupled with already having been infected, the likelihood of a recovered COVID patient both getting the virus and transmitting it is so low that it makes further masking of these people unconscionable.

With this thought fresh in your mind, now consider the insane abuse our government continues to foist upon kids by masking them seven hours a day in school. You can have a child who already had the virus and currently has no symptoms, yet he is still forced to wear a mask. What’s worse, with mass testing of children, yet extremely low rates of infection in recent weeks, the chance of false positives is extremely high. Last week, Professor Jon Deeks, a biostatistician from the University of Birmingham, told the U.K. Telegraph, “It seems likely that over 70% of positive test results are false positives, potentially many more.”

So, children continue to be masked or even removed from school with no symptoms, based on faulty testing, predicated on a false assumption of mass asymptomatic spread – when so many of them already have immunity. In other words, this cycle can go on forever.

Just how big a lie is mass asymptomatic spread? Last month, the Federalist’s Georgi Boorman trenchantly observed how the CDC mistakenly admitted that its entire premise of masking and isolating asymptomatic people is based on a lie. While finally acknowledging in its Jan. 29 report the fact of insignificant levels of spread in schools, the CDC let the following genie out of the bottle:

“Children might be more likely to be asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 than are adults. … This apparent lack of transmission [in schools] is consistent with recent research (5), which found an asymptomatic attack rate of only 0.7% within households and a lower rate of transmission from children than from adults. However, this study was unable to rule out asymptomatic transmission within the school setting because surveillance testing was not conducted” (emphasis added).

So, when it comes to explaining why children rarely spread the virus, the CDC settled on the principle that children usually get infected asymptomatically, which means very little transmission! That would apply to adults who don’t have symptoms, too, but the CDC will never concede that point. In fact, the low rate of transmission in that study includes both asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases. Nevertheless, despite the CDC admitting that kids, especially young kids, are not vectors of spread, it updated its guidance to continue recommending that children as young as two, aka babies, wear masks at child care facilities except for when they are eating and sleeping!Which raises the question: With so many people already having had the virus and feeling healthy, what is the legal justification for using the police power of quarantine against those people? There is none, and there never has been a legitimate constitutional authority, yet they’ve done it anyway. In other words, if we don’t end this tyranny now, it will never end, because quarantine and masking are no longer a means but an end.

Biden is crumbling before our eyes

  • There is no clear answer as to why his team do not trust the President to give a Press Conference

Joe Biden’s decline has become so painful to see and so embarrassing to watch that it feels cruel to mention it. But it’s even more cruel that Biden’s team act as if it’s not happening, and most of America’s media look the other way.

On Thursday night, Biden marked the first anniversary of the Covid-19 shutdowns and his fiftieth day in the White House by giving the first televised address of his presidency. He hadn’t been seen in public for three days.

From the moment he wheezed up to the lectern and peered into the camera, you could tell Biden was on top form: croaky sentiment, sporadic belligerence, and only the occasional moment when he looked oddly distant and perplexed.

He got through twenty minutes, then tottered off without taking any questions. This is how low the bar now is for Biden. And we can see how hard Biden has to fight, and what a long run-up he requires, if he is to clear it.

We can see it in his struggle to follow the simple lines on his autocue, and in his bungling of the simplest ad-libs. We see it in the clips of his increasingly desperate handlers trying to block him from questions at his rare and carefully managed appearances before the cameras. Most of all, we see it in his eyes.

“What am I doing here?” Biden asked after fumbling his autocue lines in an address in Texas in late February. He reached for the cue cards that are now his constant companion. “I’m gonna lose track here.”

Biden’s supporters call him “gaffe-prone”. It’s true: he’s always thought with his mouth open. It’s also true that he bravely overcame a speech impediment in childhood, and that anxiety and age can cause a stutter to recur. But these aren’t gaffes or stutters.

Compare how he moves and sounds now to how he was a year ago, let alone five years ago. Biden looks and sounds frail. He seems visibly distressed at his inability to carry out the simplest requirements of office – and at a time when the requirements are simpler than usual.

When Biden dodged the press during last year’s election campaign, his aides called it Covid-19 precautions. As the pandemic ends, he will run out of excuses for not travelling. He doesn’t look capable of leading an international summit, let alone taking the proverbial 3 a.m. phone call.

Earlier this week, the Commander-in-Chief forgot the name of the largest department in the US government, the Department of Defense, as well as the name of the man he recently appointed as its leader, Lloyd Austin.

“Thank you to the Sec… the former general… I keep calling him general… my… my… the guy who runs that outfit over there,” he flailed.

Biden is the first President in decades to reach fifty days in office without giving a press conference. He missed giving the traditional speech to Congress in February. His handlers refuse to name when he might talk to the press, and only offer that it’s “something he will do in the future”.

There’s only one possible explanation. Biden’s team don’t trust him to manage one of the simplest requirements of modern political office. But they know they can’t defer the reckoning.

The longer Biden waits, the more newsworthy his delayed appearance will be, and the greater the scrutiny of his performance. And once Biden has surrendered to the rising expectation that he speak live and unscripted, he will be expected to do it again, and again, just like any other President.

This presidency is turning into a theatre of cruelty. It can only end one way. Sooner or later, Biden will be caught in the spotlight. The Democrats who promoted an unfit candidate to America’s highest office, and the media who covered for him, will be exposed as having betrayed their responsibilities to the American people. The people’s trust in democratic institutions will decline further. And we will all be party to Biden’s public humiliation.

Dominic Green is deputy editor of The Spectator’s US edition

Dems attempt to overturn Iowa election

Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) told Breitbart News on Sunday how Rita Hart, her defeated Democrat opponent in November’s election for Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, is attempting to overturn the election results and disenfranchise Iowa’s voters.

Miller-Meeks explained that her opponent is asking the House Committee on Administration — run by a six-to-three Democrat majority — to overturn the election results. In Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, 394,439 people voted in the 2020 election, with Miller-Meeks ultimately winning by 6 votes. Hart argues 22 Democrat ballots deemed illegitimate should have been counted, giving her the election.

“They are disenfranchising 400,000 voters,” Miller-Meeks determined. “They are disenfranchising all of these voters by this process.”

“What [my opponent’s campaign] did was avail themselves to a provision of the Constitution that says Congress will seat its members, and appeal to the House Committee on Administration to overturn the election based upon 22 ballots that … in all likelihood would have been rejected by Iowa courts,” Miller-Meeks commented. “That takes it from a campaign election process with election law to a political process and it’s a partisan political process.”

The Des Moines Register reported Hart is asking the Democrat-majority House of Representatives to overturn the certified election results:

But Hart has claimed in a petition filed to the U.S. House of Representatives that 22 legally cast ballots were not counted and could have swayed the outcome of the race. She is asking the Democrat-controlled body to weigh in on the contest and determine its outcome — a move that has drawn the ire of Republicans who argue the issue should be settled in the Iowa courts.

Miller-Meeks remarked, “So basically, what my opponent is now doing is asking the Democrats who are in control of Congress to overturn an election that was duly certified [and] duly recounted — [the election] was counted, recounted, certified — and to toss all that out in favor of her.”

Miller-Meeks explained the election’s initial results and recount.

“When the 24 counties in [Iowa’s] 2nd Congressional District had their official county campus, which is one week after the election, I was still declared the winner,” she remarked. “I was still ahead, and then our opponent requested a recount in Iowa.  There are recount boards in every county. Each candidate gets to pick a person, and then they’re supposed to agree upon a third person, and if they don’t agree upon a third person, then it’s appointed by the district judge.”

She continued, “It was made known to us right away that our opponent’s representative on the recount board was not going to agree to anybody we put forward, even when we suggested, in some counties, someone from the county auditor’s office — that we didn’t even know — be the third person, and [my opponent] disavowed that. Nonetheless, throughout this recount process [and]  everything that went on, I still came out ahead by six votes.”

“The ballots are looked at in accordance with Iowa law, and so all of the legal ballots were counted,” she added. “All of those ballots were put in place. I was still ahead at every single juncture. I was ahead of my opponent, and so then, at the end of November, I was certified the winner of that election by a bipartisan — three Republicans, two Democrats — executive council, one of whom is our state auditor who is a Democrat.”

She went on, “At that juncture, my opponent could have asked the Iowa courts to look at any ballots that they were concerned about. They did not do that. They did not avail themselves of that opportunity, and we think they didn’t because they would have lost in a court and an Iowa court.”

Hart’s campaign and legal team are asking House Democrats to count 22 votes repeatedly deemed illegitimate by Iowa’s election apparatus to overturn the election.

Miller-Meeks stated, “The recount board … determined [that these were] illegitimate ballots when they were originally tallied. They were determined to be illegitimate ballots at the county canvas, and then the recount board determined that they were illegitimate ballots. … At three junctures during the election, they were determined to be illegitimate invalid ballots.”

Marc Elias is leading the legal team representing Hart’s campaign in its attempts to overturn the certified election results of Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District.

“If Mark Elias and Rita Hart wanted these ballots to be determined to be legitimate ballots, or if they thought there were irregularities, they should have gone to [Iowa] courts to ask the court to intervene and intercede,” Miller-Meeks said, “but they didn’t do that, and there’s a reason they didn’t do that. There’s a reason they went from an election law process to a partisan political process.”

Miller-Meeks warned of national implications if House Democrats set the precedent of overturning her election and installing her opponent as the representative for Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District.

“Every single Democrat voted to seat every representative [on January 3], including me,” she noted. “No one made a contest. No one made a motion that I should not be seated [or that] I should not be sworn in. … Think about the precedent that this sets: You have someone who is elected, someone who is ahead at the juncture of a county canvas, someone who is ahead after a recount, [and] someone who is certified by a bipartisan executive council of their state.”

She continued, “[My opponent] could have appealed to the courts in [Iowa], and [she] bypassed that to then ask Congress to overthrow those certified election results, and [she] deliberately … skipped over the Iowa courts because [she] knew [she] would lose in Iowa courts, and then it would have been worse for [her] appealing to the House Committee on Administration if the court had not ruled in [her] favor.”

“It sets a bad precedent because if Congress is going to over overturn elections,” Miller-Meeks concluded, “Then what hope is there for any of us? It’s not just an Iowa thing. It’s not about me personally. This has ramifications for all of us and in every state.”

Breitbart News reported Friday that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she is “open to a ‘scenario’ in which the Democrat-run House of Representatives would overturn a close Republican win.”

Republican State Attorneys General Battle Biden’s Immigration Rollbacks

Several state Republican attorneys general are seeking court actions to preserve former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies while President Joe Biden works to undo them.

“I think the one thing that is becoming crystal clear with the Biden administration is that they are going all-in on ‘open borders,'” Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said, according to The Hill. “It’s troublesome, and I think that, in the long run, this is going to hurt America.”

The court battles come after years of Democrat AGs suing to stop Trump’s immigration policies. Now, the GOP is looking to judges to help keep policies in place that it says protects the public and saves billions in federal tax dollars.

Clashes between the White House and opposition party state AGs are frequent, legal experts say, and some of the recent conflicts can at least partially be traced to continued congressional gridlock on immigration. Into that vacuum, presidents have imposed their agenda using executive action.

During his first week in office, Biden backed legislation providing a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But he also used his executive powers to stop some of Trump’s policies, sparking legal challenges from Republican state attorneys.

On Biden’s first day, his Department of Homeland Security enacted a 100-day halt on deportations of almost all illegal immigrants. David Pekoske, Biden’s then-acting DHS secretary, said the pause would “ensure we have a fair and effective immigration enforcement system focused on protecting national security, border security, and public safety.”

Within days, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, filed suit, saying Biden’s plan, if it wasn’t blocked, would “cause Texas immediate and irreparable harm.” The American Civil Liberties Union, which is backing Biden in the lawsuit, says the president’s order is lawful, however.

“From our perspective, this is really about Texas’s interference in the 100-day pause and attempting to continue the immigration policies of the Trump administration,” Kate Huddleston, an attorney with the ACLU in Texas, told The Hill.

Judge Drew Tipton, who Trump nominated to the bench last year, ruled against the Biden administration, however, and suspended the 100-day deportation ban nationally, finding the administration didn’t offer an adequate legal reason to stop the migrant removals. 

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody also attacked the deportation freeze, saying on March 9 after filing a lawsuit that “the Biden administration’s reckless policy of refusing to do their jobs and deport criminals places all those gains and Floridians’ public safety at risk.”

A dozen GOP state attorneys general are also pushing to preserve Trump’s “public charge” rule, a measure creating high barriers for poor immigrants seeking residency in the United States. 

The rule, enacted in 2019, imposes strict financial requirements on potential immigrants, directing federal authorities to refuse green cards and visas for applicants who could enter the country and need to collect public assistance benefits. 

The Republican AGs say the rule saves more than $1 billion in tax dollars, though critics term it a “wealth test” for immigrants. 

The issue is being litigated in three federal appeals courts and it’s likely to eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

State challenges, though, are facing an uphill fight because courts typically see immigration as a federal, not a state, matter. 

Biden has already rolled back several other areas of Trump’s immigration agenda, including stopping construction on Trump’s border wall, ending many travel restrictions and boosting an Obama administration deportation shield for young illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. 

Data Shows 18 Active Cases Related To Election Irregularities

Election fraud cases from the 2020 presidential election are still being looked into. Data shows there are still 18 active court cases out of the 83 total filed in relation to the last election cycle. However, the majority of the inactive cases were not looked into by the courts.

Twenty-one cases related to election fraud were based on merit with President Trump and the GOP winning 14 of those. There are active lawsuits in 11 states with the majority in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

This came after the Supreme Court refused to hear multiple election-related lawsuits last month, which arose from possible election fraud in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The high court did not provide a justification for rejecting one of the more contentious cases filed by U.S. attorney Sidney Powell in Pennsylvania

Powell alleged there was evidence of electronic manipulation of votes, which resulted in thousands of ballots not being counted in multiple states.

“In this case it requires forensic evaluations of the machines and looking at all of the paper ballots, we already know that’s not going to match up,” explained the attorney. “There were counterfeit ballots…if you just keep running the same counterfeit bill through the same counting machine, you’re going to get the same result.”

According to the Heritage Foundation, there have been over 1,300 proven cases of voter fraud in recent years and over 1,100 convictions.

Biden admin. asks Supreme Court to drop cases challenging ban on Title X funding of abortion clinics

The Biden administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss litigation over a rule that prohibits federal Title X family planning funds from going to clinics and organizations that provide or promote abortion as a method of family planning. 

Acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar submitted a short brief to the high court last Friday requesting that the cases filed against the rule be dismissed since both sides have agreed to end the litigation and bear their own costs.

In 2019, the Trump administration issued a final rule barring Title X funds from going to entities that provide or promote abortion for family planning, prompting multiple lawsuits in response. The rule essential barred Title X funding from going to clinics where abortion is provided.

Representatives of the American Medical Association and multiple states, who had filed suits against the 2019 rule, also filed a short brief requesting dismissal. 

The decision to end the litigation came in response to a memorandum issued by President Joe Biden in January stating the intention of rolling back the 2019 rule.

The January memo asked the Department of Health and Human Services to review restrictions on funding for abortion providers and other entities that promote abortion.

Biden concluded that the Title X rule put “undue restrictions” on the use of federal funds and put “women’s health at risk by making it harder for women to receive complete medical information.”  

“The [law] specifies that Title X funds may not be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning, but places no further abortion-related restrictions on recipients of Title X funds,” reads the Biden memo.

Earlier this month, 19 states filed a joint motion to ask the Supreme Court to stop the Biden administration from scrapping the Title X rule, also known as the “Protect Life Rule.” 

“To be sure, some States provide such funding. And many advocates would like to see more public funding. But the broader national consensus against funding elective abortion remains,” stated the joint motion.

“Title X reflects this consensus. Since its 1970 enactment, the law has funded non-abortion family planning. All the while, it has banned the use of Title X funds ‘in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.’”

The short briefs filed by Prelogar and the plaintiffs argued that the 19 states were “not parties to these cases,” and so their joint motion does “not prevent the parties from stipulating to dismissal.”

The Trump-era Title X rule drew strong opposition from Planned Parenthood, which led to the nation’s largest abortion provider exiting the Title X family planning program. 

The Title X program was enacted during the Nixon administration and grants hundreds of millions of dollars each year to health clinics across the nation to provide contraceptives, cancer screenings, STD testing and other health care services to low-income patients.

Before its exit from the program, Planned Parenthood was the largest provider of Title X care in the country. 

Last September, an appeals court upheld a ruling that blocked the Trump administration from enforcing the Title X rule. In February 2020, the Ninth Circuit upheld the Title X rule in a 7-4 decision. 

Last month, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear litigation on the matter and consolidated three cases. 

Leading pro-life advocate Marjorie Dannenfelser was confident that the nation’s high court, with a conservative majority, would rule that future administrations have the right to “disentangle Title X taxpayer funding from the abortion industry.”

Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook.

Border jumpers carry dramatically higher COVID-19 rates than U.S. population

Migrant families coming across the border are testing positive for the coronavirus at between three and 10 times the rate of the U.S. population, according to a Washington Times survey of jurisdictions that are doing the testing.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Times that the families it is processing are between 5% and 10% positive.

In Brownsville, Texas, the city says it is seeing a 12% positive rate.

And in Harlingen, near Brownsville, the homeless shelter where families are being dropped off reported a group at 25% positive for COVID-19. That’s more than seven times the current positivity test rate for the U.S. public, which Johns Hopkins University’s tracker shows at 3.5%.

Pastor Bill Reagan, who runs Loaves and Fishes, the Harlingen shelter, said they’re doing the best they can with the situation.

“It would be best if Customs and Border Protection decides to release certain individuals into the United States that they thoroughly quarantine them for the 14 days and test them and only release those that rest negative,” he said. “But I also understand they’re overwhelmed.”

Some of the families are being quarantined. A senior ICE official told The Times that those in its custody who test positive are able to be held in isolation, though he said they do try to get nonprofits to help take some of them.

ICE is only able to take about 100 of those family members a day. Those on the ground in Texas say there are between 500 and 800 people coming across daily, and they are being farmed out to local shelters that don’t have the power to compel someone to stick around if they don’t want to.

In Harlingen, migrants were dropped at Loaves and Fishes, the city’s homeless shelter.

Mr. Reagan told The Washington Times they saw two groups, both last month. The first on Feb. 18 was 49 people, and it had a COVID positivity rate of 25%. The second group arrived on Feb. 19 and Mr. Reagan said they came so late that they weren’t tested.

He said even when the newly arrived migrants are tested, that doesn’t catch everyone.

“I think this is probably true for all the places people have been released from Border Patrol custody. All of them have been in close quarters for a long period of time. They all come together on the bus, they’ve all been detained together, and I would suppose on their trip from Central America they have been mixing with all kinds of people,” he said.

“Say they come to us on a particular day — they may just have been exposed that day or a day earlier and not test positive because of that,” he said.

At the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that the federal government has offered Texas a system to test and isolate, but she said Gov. Greg Abbott refused to allow it.

“Their proposal and agreement would cover 100 percent of the expense, testing, isolation and quarantine. But Governor Abbott has decided to reject that,” she said.

A reporter pressed Ms. Psaki on why the federal government would block a traveler from entering at an airport without a COVID-19 test or quarantine procedures, but does not apply that same rule to migrants who break the law to jump the border.

“Well, again, I can just describe to you what our policies are,” the spokeswoman replied.

The White House has changed its version of events over the weeks. Originally Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the process was for ICE to test everyone.

Ms. Psaki last week said their policy was actually for “COVID-19 testing to be done at the state and local level and with the help of NGOs and local governments.”

But thousands of migrants have still been released without any testing, said Sheriff A.J. Louderback in Jackson County, Texas. He said Ms. Psaki was misleading the public.

“The lying is starting to bother me,” he said. “This whole piece of criminal and irresponsible government needs to be stopped, one way or the other. Either with public pressure or legal means.”

There are five broad categories of border jumpers at this point.

The first is migrants who can be expelled under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s coronavirus pandemic health order, which the Trump administration issued and the Biden team has kept in place.

The second is migrants who had been mired in Mexico under the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, which the Biden team did cancel.

Some 25,000 people who were part of MPP are now in the process of being admitted. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) is overseeing COVID testing of those folks in Mexico, and migrants are only supposed to show up for admittance once they’re in the clear.

A third group consists of the unaccompanied minors, who are supposed to be quickly transferred from Customs and Border Protection to the federal Health and Human Services Department. Dona Abbott, senior advisor at Bethany Christian Services, which helps resettle the children, said during a virtual event hosted by the National Immigration Forum that the children are entering at a rate of about 435 a day.

The children have overwhelmed CBP, leaving thousands stuck in border processing facilities longer than the legal limit of three days.

A fourth group of migrants is those who jump the border, aren’t expelled, and are processed by ICE. They are mostly families, and they are being tested and, if positive for COVID, quarantined. A senior ICE official told The Times they are able to process 80 to 100 a day.

A fifth group — again mostly families — is being caught and released at the border without testing by the government.

Some of those, particularly in Texas, are being tested by local governments and nonprofits such as Mr. Reagan’s shelter.

But not all.

In Cochise County, Arizona, migrants are being dropped at a Texaco, a Walmart and a Safeway. In Yuma County, it was a Jack in the Box restaurant.

Both U.S. officials and nonprofit group leaders said families are being released because Mexico has limited its cooperation in recent weeks. Mexican authorities will no longer accept back families with children ages 6 and under.

“Those families, we’re getting between approximately 500 and 800 every single day,” Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, said during the National Immigration Forum’s virtual event.

Sister Pimentel’s organization is doing the testing for McAllen, one of the major population centers in deep southern Texas.

She and her team have not responded to repeated inquiries from The Times over the last two weeks about her operations and the COVID positivity rate for the migrants she is receiving.

In Brownsville, another major city, Communications Director Felipe Romero said they’ve tested 1,700 migrants as of Tuesday, and 204 tested positive. That works out to a 12% rate.

The most recent week of March 4 through March 9, however, was lower, with a 9.25% positive rate.

3 Hospitalized with ‘Unusual Symptoms’ After Taking Newest COVID Vaccine

Three Norwegian health care workers have been hospitalized after receiving the newly-unveiled single-dose AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, authorities have announced, which has led to a temporary suspension of giving out the shot.

Reuters reported that the workers experienced issues relating to blood clots and other vascular issues. Norwegian authorities did not say how long the distribution of the vaccine would be halted as those people remain hospitalized.

Sigurd Hortemo with the Norwegian Medicines Agency told reporters at a media briefing with members of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health that each of the hospitalized health care workers were under the age of 50, but said the hospitalizations could not be definitively linked to the shot.

“We do not know if the cases are linked to the vaccine,” Hortemo said.

The hospitalizations will be investigated by the European Medicines Agency, Hortemo added.

Steinar Madsen, the medical director at the Norwegian Medicines Agency, told regional media that the affected individuals were very ill after receiving the shots.

“They have very unusual symptoms: bleeding, blood clots and a low count of blood platelets,” Madsen said. “They are quite sick … We take this very seriously.”

Reuters reported that no such issues were reported during its clinical trials.

AstraZeneca defended the vaccine while pointing out that those hospitalized might have experienced their symptoms with or without taking its single-shot vaccine.

“In fact, the reported numbers of these types of events for COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca are not greater than the number that would have occurred naturally in the unvaccinated population,” the pharmaceutical giant said.

The European Medicines Agency maintained that the benefits of the shot still outweigh the risks.

Denmark had already stopped the company’s shots forgoing into arms, and health authorities in Iceland followed suit this past week. Austrian authorities had previously stopped using one batch of the vaccines over concerns with the shot, as had authorities in Italy.

Meanwhile, Thailand became the first Asian country to halt the use of the company’s vaccine this past week, CNBC reported. The country’s health officials were vague when announcing the suspension.

Thai Public Health Ministry secretary Kiattiphum Wongjit called the shot a “good vaccine,” but said it would be paused because the emergence of new cases is being slowed through mitigation efforts such as quarantines.

RELATED: Countries Halting Distribution, Expert Committee Reviewing AstraZeneca COVID Vaccine After Worrying Side Effects Appear

AstraZeneca developed the single-dose vaccine in a collaboration with the University of Oxford in the U.K.

Roughly five million Europeans had received the vaccine as of this past Wednesday.

Florida Gov. DeSantis Cancels All CCP Virus Fines Issued by Local Officials

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that will eliminate all fines issued by local government officials over the past year to people and businesses in the state who violated restrictions related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

The order (pdf) was signed after the Board of Executive Clemency approved DeSantis’s proposal on March 10 to categorically remit all fines related to local government CCP virus restrictions.

“I hereby remit any fines imposed between March 1, 2020, and March 10, 2021, by any political subdivision of Florida related to local government COVID-19 restrictions,” DeSantis confirmed in the order, referring to the disease caused by the virus.

Fines excluded are those related to hospitals, assisted living facilities, and other health care providers. The order also does not apply to any CCP virus-related orders or enforcement taken by the state.

The governor mentioned during a press briefing on Thursday he thinks the fines issued are “out of control,” adding that he wants to make sure citizens are “protected.”

“Most of those restrictions have not been effective,” DeSantis told reporters at the briefing, WPTV reported.

“The evidence is in on that, so we just want to really go forward fresh,” he stated. “We want people to make decisions, but we don’t want it under the heavy-handed government.”

In September, the Republican governor announced in a similar executive order (pdf) suspending the collection of fines and penalties related to COVID-19 restrictions by local governments.

DeSantis, like the overwhelming majority of governors in the country, forced many businesses to close down in March 2020 and enacted restrictions on individuals. But he was among the first governors to ease rules, as state officials chose to focus on protecting the elderly and others with serious underlying illnesses while keeping statewide restrictions light for the less vulnerable population.

“Every Floridian has a right to earn a living and all businesses have a right to operate,” the governor told a crowd at CPAC. “Florida got it right and the lockdown states got it wrong.”

According to federal data, Florida has had 144 deaths involving COVID-19 per 100,000 residents since the beginning of the pandemic. That compares favorably with large states that enacted stricter measures. New York, for instance, has had 245 deaths per 100,000 residents.

By Day 48, Biden’s White House Had Made Major Progress In Destroying America

“Humanitarian” open borders have launched a new migrant crisis and overwhelmed the immigration system. “Wins” on climate are draining the public school system dry in oil-dependent states. Biden’s White House is destroying America.

Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed to broaden the definition of a public charge as not just those who might rely on the government for cash handouts, but those who would depend on services like food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance. It also proposed to specifically define “public charge” based on various factors such as age, health, employment history, and education.

“The 2019 public charge rule was not in keeping with our nation’s values,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “It penalized those who access health benefits and other government services available to them.”

Meanwhile, the White House is searching out even more facilities to house the unmitigated influx of unaccompanied minors arriving at the southern border. 

“We’re looking at additional facilities where we can safely house children,” press secretary Jen Psaki said. “We are looking at facilities; a lot of consideration is underway. And certainly, part of the reason is we’re—we want to have more kids able to transfer from CBP facilities to HHS facilities.”

Oil And Gas Moratorium Hurts Schools—But There’s No End In Sight.

Funding for public schools was one of the major pitches for Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan—but the pandemic has not stopped the president from making climate concessions that drain away education budgets in America’s heartland.

One week into his presidency, Biden announced a temporary moratorium on new oil and gas sales on federal lands and waters, which make up about a quarter of U.S. production. 

On Tuesday, the administration said to expect an “interim report” by summer—but the ban has no end in sight.

While scoring points with climate activists, it’s only a matter of time before the restrictions push companies to move investments and jobs outside of the United States. Potentially tens of thousands of energy jobs hang in the balance—but there’s even more at stake.

In February, NPR reported how states like New Mexico depend on oil sales to fund various government programs:

When Stan Rounds heard about U.S. President Joe Biden’s plans to suspend new drilling on federal lands to fight climate change, he worried about the education budget.

Rounds heads a state association of school administrators. He knows that New Mexico—home to the country’s richest oil fields on federal lands—depends heavily on drilling revenues to finance its struggling public schools. And budgets have already taken a hit from falling crude prices as the coronavirus pandemic sapped global fuel demand. . . .

The U.S. federal lands drilling program yielded some $1.8 billion directly to states in 2020, supporting schools and other programs in places like Wyoming and Utah, according to data from the U.S. Interior Department.

School superintendents from Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Utah, and Alaska have written to Biden asking him to reverse the ban, calling it “imperative that we bring to light the arbitrary and inequitable move to shut down oil and gas production on federal lands in our states that depend on revenues from various taxes, royalties, disbursements, and lease payments to fund our schools, community infrastructure, and public services.”

Biden Visits D.C. Hardware Store, Tells Workers “Don’t Jump!”

On a visit to W.S. Jenks & Son—Washington, D.C.’s oldest hardware store and a PPP beneficiary—Biden seized an opportunity to blame President Trump for not getting sufficient PPP funds to small businesses.

“We found out that an awful lot of that [money] went to big—bigger businesses that, in fact, weren’t supposed to qualify for this. Because they—there used be a thing called an “inspector general” to see where the money went. And the last administration fired the inspector general, so a lot of money went to people who shouldn’t have gotten help, and it didn’t go to folks who—but, you know, the significance with this new program—and we’re going to continue this, by the way—it’s not only—(inaudible) only businesses with fewer than 20 folks could apply for the last couple weeks.”

Biden then looked up at a group of employees waving down from a balcony and quipped, “Don’t jump, we need you.”

To be fair, under a Biden regime, some were probably tempted.

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