Washington State announced Monday night that it had “initiated the separation process” with Rolovich and four of his assistant coaches for not complying with the state mandate that all state employees be fully vaccinated by Monday.

Defensive coordinator Jake Dickert has been named acting head coach.

“This is a disheartening day for our football program,” said WSU athletic director Pat Chun in a statement. “Our priority has been, and will continue to be, the health and well-being of the young men on our team.”

Defensive tackles coach Ricky Logo, cornerbacks coach John Richardson, quarterbacks coach Craig Stutzmann and offensive line coach Mark Weber are also being let go.

Source: WSU football coach Nick Rolovich fired after refusing to take COVID-19 vaccine | The Seattle Times

More evidence to support masks in schools

One of the reasons it has been hard to see transmission in schools is because children generally have mild symptoms. This leads to infections going undetected. But the picture is very different when researchers actively look for cases.

Researchers in Belgium conducted a study where primary school children and their teachers were tested once per week for 15 weeks. They found many instances of transmission between children and adults that spread beyond the school to the children’s parents and to the teachers’ partners. Some mitigation measures were in place in the school, but not mask wearing.

Other measures help too

Perhaps the most dramatic example of failing to protect schools comes from England. Schools reopened this September without a mask mandate and with very little investment in ventilation.

Within one month, random testing showed that 8 per cent of secondary school children and 3 per cent of pre-primary and primary school children had an active infection.

Source: COVID-19 cases rise when schools open – but more so when teachers and students don’t wear masks – ABC News

The World Health Organization (WHO) was alerted but, this being at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, little attention was paid even when Anna Popova, chief consumer adviser to the Russian Federation, went on TV to warn “with a degree of probability” that human-to-human transmission of H5N8 would evolve soon and that work should start immediately on developing a vaccine.

Global attention is fixed on the origins of Covid-19, either in nature or from a laboratory, but eight or more variants of avian flu, all of which are able to infect and kill humans and are potentially more severe than Covid-19, now regularly rattle around the world’s factory farms barely noticed by governments.

There have been no further reports of human H5N8 infections in 2021, but concern last week turned to China, where another type of avian flu known as H5N6 has infected 48 people since it was first identified in 2014. Most cases have been linked to people working with farmed birds, but there has been a spike in recent weeks and more than half of all the people infected have died, suggesting that H5N6 is gathering pace, mutating and extremely dangerous.

WHO and Chinese virologists have been worried enough to call on governments to increase their vigilance. “The likelihood of human-to-human spread is low [but] wider geographical surveillance in the China affected areas and nearby areas is urgently required to better understand the risk and the recent increase of spillover to humans,” said a WHO Pacific-region spokesperson in a statement.

Source: Factory farms of disease: how industrial chicken production is breeding the next pandemic | Global health | The Guardian

Source: City of Vancouver tells staff to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Dec. 6 – BC | Globalnews.ca

According to the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint filed in September, Frank S. Rafaraci, 68, a U.S. citizen who resides abroad, has been the CEO of MLS since at least 2005. MLS is a defense contractor that provides ship husbanding services, such as refueling and stocking provisions, to U.S. Navy ships at ports worldwide. From approximately 2010 to the present, the U.S. Navy, other U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) components, and U.S. government civilian agencies awarded husbanding services contracts to MLS worth approximately $1.3 billion. The affidavit further alleges that, beginning in 2011, Rafaraci was involved in a wide-ranging scheme to bribe U.S. Navy officials, defraud the U.S. Navy using falsely inflated invoices, and launder the proceeds of the scheme through shell companies Rafaraci had set up in the United Arab Emirates, all in an effort to benefit MLS. Rafaraci made his initial appearance earlier today before U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.Source: CEO of Major Defense Contractor Charged with Bribery | OPA | Department of Justice

Just hours before the deadline, the city of Seattle reported Monday morning that 99% of its employees are in compliance with the mayor’s vaccine mandate.

By 11:59 p.m. Monday, all Seattle city employees have to be vaccinated against COVID-19, per an August order by Mayor Jenny Durkan. As of Monday morning, 94% of the city’s 11,000 employees had been vaccinated and an additional 5% have filed paperwork to be exempted from the order. The remaining 150, or about 1%, had not yet complied.

At a news conference Monday, Durkan said she was “so proud” of the compliance numbers, and made a last minute plea to those who hadn’t filed paperwork.

Source: Seattle touts 99% compliance with employee vaccine mandate hours before deadline | The Seattle Times

A federal jury convicted a Houston-area physician for unlawfully prescribing more than 1.3 million doses of opioids.

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Parvez Qureshi, 56, of Houston, Texas, a medical doctor, conspired to and did unlawfully prescribe controlled substances from 2014 through February 2016 for patients at Spring Shadows Medical Clinic of Houston (Spring Shadows), a clinic owned by Rubeena Ayesha, an advanced practice nurse practitioner. Ayesha, 52, of Houston, previously pleaded guilty to participating in the scheme and is awaiting sentencing before U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt of the Southern District of Texas.

Trial evidence showed that Qureshi issued unlawful prescriptions for controlled substances to over 90 people on the clinic’s busiest days. So-called “runners” brought numerous people to pose as patients at Spring Shadows and paid for their visits. Spring Shadows charged approximately $250-$500 for each patient visit and required payment in cash.

The evidence also showed that Qureshi pre-signed prescriptions for controlled substances and issued prescriptions for patients who were not evaluated by a physician. Throughout the scheme, Qureshi wrote prescriptions for over 1.3 million dosage units of hydrocodone, and over 40,000 dosage units of oxycodone, both Schedule II controlled substances. Ayesha wrote prescriptions for over one million dosage units of carisoprodol, commonly known as Soma, a Schedule IV controlled substance, usually for patients who had also been prescribed oxycodone or hydrocodone by Qureshi. The combination of oxycodone/hydrocodone and carisoprodol is a dangerous drug cocktail with no known medical benefit. The clinic made over $4 million from prescriptions issued in the scheme, over $1.5 million of which went to Qureshi.

Source: Texas Physician Found Guilty for Unlawfully Prescribing Over 1.3 Million Doses of Opioids | OPA | Department of Justice

Evidence now provides a clear warning: deforestation, degradation, and climate change are together pushing the Amazon rapidly towards a point beyond which it may not be able to recover. In the last years, political instability in the region, simultaneously affecting different countries, correlates with increasing deforestation rates in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. Around 17% of the Pan-Amazon has been deforested, with an additional 17% considered as degraded. Connections between land and rivers mean that degradation also threatens freshwater species and ecosystems. Recent research results indicated that in parts of the Amazon, the forest switches from sink to a source of carbon due to climate change, deforestation, and forest degradation. Amazonian forests are susceptible to drought and fires, while floodplain systems are vulnerable to changes in flooding regimes. Land-use changes reinforce climate change, reducing forest resilience with risks for human health, food, and water security over vast regions of South America, including its southeastern part and the Andes, and the La Plata Basin in the Southern part of the continent whose precipitation depends significantly on the Amazon.

Source: Amazonian ecosystems and peoples on the brink – it is time for a new vision (commentary)

Roberts’s deleted tweet said “the fact that Colin Powell died from a breakthrough COVID infection raises new concerns about how effective vaccines are long-term.”

It was met with an immediate backlash online, where plenty of those responding noted that Powell’s age and specific health history put him at a higher risk for COVID-19.

In a series of follow-up tweets, Roberts explained he’d deleted the tweet because it had been interpreted as being “anti-vax.”

Roberts said he had encouraged people to get vaccines and that he also though booster shots could be important

Source: Australian official responds to Ted Cruz’s COVID-19 remarks | Fort Worth Star-Telegram