Dozens of Houston Methodist employees protested outside the hospital, some of them wielding signs, which read “Vaxx is Venom,” and “Don’t Lose Sight Of Our Rights,” according to a report by the New York Times.

One nurse who led the protest at the hospital said she will not get the vaccine, because it has not been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Houston Methodist Hospital became the first U.S. hospital system to require coronavirus vaccines for employees when it mandated that all staff members get the jab by June 7.

The hospital warned that employees who don’t get vaccinated by the Monday deadline will be placed on a two-week unpaid suspension, adding that it will “initiate the employee termination process” for staffers who are found to still be unvaccinated by the end of their suspensions.

Last month, 117 Houston Methodist Hospital employees filed a lawsuit against the hospital over the vaccine policy, the report adds. The lawsuit argues that the hospital is “forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment.”

Hesitancy about getting vaccinated against the coronavirus is not isolated to employees of Houston Methodist Hospital.

A survey conducted in March by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a little more than half of all frontline health care workers said they received at least their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine — despite the fact that health care workers were among the first groups eligible.

The survey also discovered that among the unvaccinated health care workers — who had not decided if they would get the vaccine or answered that they did not plan to — a large majority of them had concerns about potential side-effects, as well as the newness of the vaccine.

Two-thirds of the respondents said they did not trust the government to ensure the safety and effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccines.

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Turning Point USA (TPUSA) announced this week that it is launching a nationwide campaign titled No Forced Vax across its network of more than 2,500 high school and university chapters, to fight back against mandated coronavirus vaccinations on campus. TPUSA added that students should not be forced to live in “a medical apartheid.”

“I’m not anti-COVID vaccination, and I’m not pro-COVID vaccination — I’m vaccine agnostic. But I am 100% against mandating the COVID vaccination,” said TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk in a statement on Tuesday.

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and several other Republicans introduced legislation Tuesday to codify a Trump-era virus control protocol that allows U.S. border authorities to remove migrants quickly in the interest of public health.

Invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020 and kept in place by President Joe Biden, the measure, known as Title 42, aims to stem the spread of the Chinese coronavirus.

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YouTube has reinstated a video it censored of a school board meeting in Lake Forest, Illinois, which featured several concerned parents speaking out against mask mandates on their children.

“Upon further review, we’re reinstating the Lake Forest School District’s video,” a YouTube spokesperson told Breitbart News. “We have policies in place to allow content that might otherwise violate our policies as long as it includes educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic (EDSA) context.”

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Author Naomi Wolf, until recently known primarily for her left-wing feminist views, has been banned from Twitter for “vaccine misinformation.”

Wolf has been alienating fellow progressives in recent months by questioning lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations. According to reports on Twitter, Wolf says the platform banned for quoting from a Republican state senator’s press release announcing a ban on vaccine passports in Oregon.

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Monkeypox “typically begins with flu-like illness and swelling of the lymph nodes and progresses to a widespread rash on the face and body. Most infections last 2-4 weeks. Monkeypox is in the same family of viruses as smallpox but causes a milder infection,” the CDC reported in a news release.

The CDC noted that infections involving the strain of monkeypox that this individual contracted are deadly in about 1 in 100 people, though rates can be higher in individuals with weakened immune systems.

On July 8-9, the individual flew aboard a flight from Nigeria to Atlanta and then took another flight from Atlanta to Dallas.

The CDC said that the danger of transmission through respiratory droplets aboard those flights is thought to be low due to COVID-19-related mask requirements.

“Travelers on these flights were required to wear masks as well as in the U.S. airports due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it’s believed the risk of spread of monkeypox via respiratory droplets to others on the planes and in the airports is low,” according to the CDC.

Less than two decades ago in 2003 there was a Monkeypox outbreak among humans in the U.S. after the illness “spread from imported African rodents to pet prairie dogs,” the CDC noted.

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Comedian and former Daily Show host Jon Stewart was one of the first guests back on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Monday night, and he made his views fully known on what he believes to be the origins of the novel coronavirus: the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

After some preliminary “welcome back to real life” comments and questions, Stewart expressed fully his understanding that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan. He mocked the concept of animal transmission, joking that pangolins and turtles making out was not the source of the virus that erupted into a global pandemic.
“Uhh, a pangolin kissed a turtle? …Or maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have coronavirus?” Stewart joked.

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Novavax Inc on Monday reported late-stage data from its U.S.-based clinical trial showing its vaccine is more than 90% effective against COVID-19 across a variety of variants of the virus.

The study of nearly 30,000 volunteers in the United States and Mexico puts Novavax on track to file for emergency authorization in the United States and elsewhere in the third quarter of 2021, the company said.

Novavax’s protein-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate was more than 93% effective against the predominant variants of COVID-19 that have been of concern among scientists and public health officials, Novavax said.

Protein-based vaccines are a conventional approach that use purified pieces of the virus to spur an immune response and vaccines again whooping cough and shingles employ this approach.

During the trial, the B.1.1.7 variant first discovered in the United Kingdom became the most common variant in the United States, it said.

Novavax also detected variants of COVID-19 first found in Brazil, South Africa and India among its trial participants, Novavax’s head of research and development, Dr. Gregory Glenn, told Reuters.

The vaccine was 91% effective among volunteers at high risk of severe infection and 100% effective in preventing moderate and severe cases of COVID-19. It was roughly 70% effective against COVID-19 variants that Novavax was unable to identify, Glenn said.

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People who are fully vaccinated against coronavirus no longer need to wear masks while indoors or outdoors or physical distance in either large or small gatherings, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announced during a White House COVID-19 briefing Thursday.

Fully vaccinated individuals are still advised to wear masks while in crowded indoor settings such as while on public transportation and in hospitals, prisons and homeless shelters.

“We have all longed for this moment when we can get back to some sense of normalcy,” Walensky said. “Based on the continuing downward trajectory of cases, the scientific data on the performance of our vaccines and our understanding of how the virus spreads, that moment has come for those who are fully vaccinated.”

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