Day: August 18, 2021

Recount!? Census hit by cyber-attack!

Census hacked.. “no systems or data maintained and managed by the Census Bureau on behalf of the public were compromised, manipulated or lost”

AND NOW WE FIND OUT!

U.S. Census Bureau computer servers were exploited last year during a cybersecurity attack, but it didn’t involve the 2020 census, and hackers’ attempts to keep access to the system were unsuccessful, according to a watchdog report released Wednesday.

The attack took place in January 2020 on the bureau’s remote access servers.

According to the Office of Inspector General, the Census Bureau missed opportunities to limit its vulnerability to the attack and didn’t discover and report the attack in a timely manner.

The agency also failed to keep sufficient system logs, which hindered the investigation, and was using operating system no longer supported by the vendor, the watchdog report said.

The report went on to state that the bureau’s firewalls stopped the attacker’s attempts to maintain access to the system through a backdoor, but unauthorized changes were still made, including the creation of user accounts.

“Furthermore, no systems or data maintained and managed by the Census Bureau on behalf of the public were compromised, manipulated or lost,” Jarmin wrote.

….do you trust that?

BIDEN TO NURSING HOMES: GET JABBED OR LOSE FEDERAL FUNDING! EMERGENCY REGS SET FOR SEPTEMBER!

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid will issue an emergency regulation in September, making staff vaccination a condition of funding.

THIS STORY IS DEVELOPING..

President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that he is directing all nursing homes to require their staff be vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to continue receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding.

Biden said he is directing the Department of Health and Human Services to draw up new regulations making employee vaccination a condition for nursing homes to participate in Medicare and Medicaid. The decision on nursing home staff represents a significant escalation in Biden’s campaign to get Americans vaccinated and the tools he is willing to use, marking the first time he has threatened to withhold federal funds in order to get people vaccinated.

MORE..

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid will issue an emergency regulation in September, making staff vaccination a condition of funding.

A nursing home industry group, however, said imposing a mandate only on such facilities could cause a “disastrous workforce challenge,” instead arguing all health care workers in all settings should be subject to the requirement.

“Focusing only on nursing homes will cause vaccine-hesitant workers to flee to other health care providers and leave many centers without adequate staff to care for residents. It will make an already difficult workforce shortage even worse,” said Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living, which represents 14,000 facilities. “The net effect of this action will be the opposite of its intent and will affect the ability to provide quality care to our residents.”

All of this news come amid the booster shots being made available in September..

The booster shot-plan, which applies only to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, calls for Americans to get a booster shot eight months after receiving their second doses.

There are expectations that a booster shot will be needed for people who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but they are still reviewing data and will announce plans at a later date.

DEVELOPING…

Variants vs. vaccines: Is the COVID-19 race ever going to end?

From the Jeruselem Post: On Monday, Dr. Asher Salmon, director of the Health Ministry’s Department of International Relations, told the Knesset that there was a South American variant that had made its way into the US, and if it came to Israel, “we will reach the lockdown that we so desperately want to avoid.”
FIRST, HOW a variant behaves in a country in South America does not necessarily reflect how it will behave in a country such as Israel. That’s because countries such as India or Peru have challenged health systems and high levels of poverty, explained Yasmin Maor, head of the Infectious Disease Unit at Wolfson Medical Center.

“It is difficult to extrapolate how a particular variant will behave with a better health system,” she said, recalling the South African variant that threatened to break the Israeli healthcare system but barely infected Israelis.

That’s likely one of the reasons that Health Ministry Director-General Nachman Ash said later Monday in an interview with KAN News, “I do not want to create unnecessary panic.”
— Read on m.jpost.com/health-science/variants-vs-vaccines-is-the-covid-19-race-ever-going-to-end-analysis-676982

The article also goes out to correctly point out how long previous pandemics often lasted.. sometimes for hundreds of years like the Bubonic plague.. the HIV pandemic and AIDS was filled with fear and mystery until life extending drugs were finally approved…

And now as the United States government announces an autumn of boosters, people fatigued by fear, anger, and frustration, are coming to grips with the idea that COVID, just maybe, never ends …