West Virginia Board of Education Hires Legal Counsel in School Vaccine Lawsuit + More
Source: Children’s Health Defense
West Virginia Board of Education Hires Legal Counsel in School Vaccine Lawsuit
The West Virginia Board of Education has retained outside counsel to represent it in a lawsuit over the state’s school vaccination policy. The board has retained Ben Bailey, co-founder of the Charleston-based firm Bailey & Glasser, according to board Vice President Victor Gabriel.
“The board is now in possession of a lawsuit in which we are named in regards to immunizations,” Gabriel said during a special meeting Wednesday. “The board has hired outside counsel to represent us — Mr. Ben Bailey of Bailey & Glasser will be representing the board in this endeavor.”
The suit was filed by Miranda Guzman — the mother of a 4-year-old — against the Raleigh County Board of Education and the state board due to her religious objections to the vaccination policy.
New York Fed Must Face Lawsuit Over COVID Vaccine Firing, Appeals Court Rules
A federal appeals court on Wednesday revived part of a lawsuit accusing the Federal Reserve Bank of New York of illegally firing two longtime employees who claimed religious objections against COVID-19 vaccinations.
In a 3-0 decision, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found disputed issues over the sincerity of Jeanette Diaz’s religious opposition to COVID-19 vaccines, and said the New York Fed’s contrary evidence “at best” challenged her credibility.
The Manhattan-based court also upheld the dismissal of claims by a second plaintiff, Lori Gardner-Alfred. It returned Diaz’s case to U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman, who dismissed the case in September 2023. Steven Warshawsky, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, had no immediate comment. The New York Fed declined to comment.
Diaz, of Bayonne, New Jersey, and Gardner-Alfred, of the Bronx, New York, were senior executive specialists with a respective 27 years and 35 years of experience at the New York Fed before being fired in March 2022 for refusing vaccinations. Diaz said she believed vaccines were made with aborted fetal cells, and inconsistent with teachings of the Catholic Church.
Louisiana Wants to Censor Citizen Science, but Residents Are Fighting Back
Louisiana Illuminator reported:
Very few places exemplify our country’s shameful health disparities as much as Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” Notorious for its toxic air and alarmingly high cancer rates, this petrochemical hub between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is where oil, gas and chemical corporations make their profitable products at the expense of the local population.
It’s a moral disgrace that neither Louisiana’s government nor the federal government has acted with urgency to end this well known injustice. Even United Nations human rights experts have condemned the environmental racism driving the poisoning of Cancer Alley, whose residents are disproportionately poor, Black or both.
Local communities have done their best to fill these gaps. People living near polluting facilities like those in Cancer Alley have started using pollution measuring equipment to monitor air quality in their communities for themselves. This is an example of “citizen science,” where the collection of scientific data is crowdsourced. But lawmakers in Louisiana and beyond are trying to quash this work.
Trump Administration’s Citizenship Database Avoids Oversight; Ignites Big Brother Fears
In a sweeping move that has reshaped the architecture of federal identity verification, the Trump administration has created a searchable nationwide citizenship data exchange that ostensibly is being used to verify U.S. citizenship status for voter eligibility, but which could just as easily be used to monitor every American citizen in apparent violation of a slew of federal privacy laws and without Congressional oversight.
The expansion of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system and its convergence with the Federal Data Services Hub reflects a broad shift toward predictive governance and centralized identity control.
While the original purpose of SAVE was to validate non-citizen eligibility for entitlements, the new system undergirds a sweeping new framework of automated citizenship verification that easily could be used not just for determining voting eligibility, but potentially for law enforcement, immigration enforcement, financial eligibility assessments, or outright profiling and dossier compilations on citizens reminiscent of a Sci Fi dystopian world.
Court Approves Sale of 23andMe to Nonprofit Led by Former CEO Anne Wojcicki
A bankruptcy court this week approved the $305 million sale of genetics testing firm 23andMe to a nonprofit organization led by the company’s former CEO Anne Wojcicki, the company announced. The 23andMe bankruptcy earlier this year elicited fears about the security of genetic data belonging to the company’s roughly 15 million customers.
The TTAM Research Institute, or TTAM, a California-based nonprofit set to acquire 23andMe, plans to maintain the company’s customer privacy policies and add further data security measures, 23andMe said in a statement.
The sale replaces a previous $256 million bid announced in May by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which said the genetic information could improve drug development. Last month, 27 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit to block the sale of customers’ genetic information without their consent.
