“When you have got ads like this, with a younger woman with a patch on her arm, all smiling,” Cepicky stated as he held up a duplicate of a social media submit throughout a current listening to, per the Occasions. “Everyone knows how impressionable our younger individuals are, and wanting to slot in in life.” Throughout that very same listening to, Lisa Piercey, the Tennessee’s well being commissioner, defined to lawmakers that “Underneath no circumstance is the division encouraging kids to hunt out vaccination with out parental consent,” including that she knew of simply eight circumstances during which the doctrine had been invoked—with three of them being for her personal kids whereas she was at work.

However, with conservatives on an anti-science, anti-public-health rampage, the division has since scaled again its vaccination marketing campaign and, in line with the Occasions, eliminated social media posts informing people who kids 12 and older are eligible to get inoculated. Per The Tennessean, the Division of Well being may even “cease all COVID-19 vaccine occasions on faculty property, regardless of holding a minimum of one such occasion this month,” and “take steps to make sure it now not sends postcards or different notices reminding youngsters to get their second dose of the coronavirus vaccines.” Oh, and the clampdown isn’t nearly coronavirus photographs anymore:

The Tennessee Division of Well being will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach—not simply for coronavirus, however all illnesses—amid stress from Republican state lawmakers, in line with an inner report and company emails obtained by The Tennessean. If the well being division should situation any details about vaccines, workers are instructed to strip the company emblem off the paperwork.

In her assertion, Fiscus wrote that well being officers have been “disparaged, demeaned, accused, and typically vilified by a public who chooses to not imagine in science, and elected and appointed officers who’ve put their very own self-interest above the individuals they had been chosen to characterize and shield.… [It] was MY job to offer evidence-based schooling and vaccine entry in order that Tennesseans might shield themselves in opposition to COVID-19. I’ve now been terminated for doing precisely that.”

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Texas governor threatens to arrest Democratic lawmakers for standing up for voting rights

Elected officers, standing up for the rights of their constituents? Not on Greg Abbott’s watch! Per Insider:

Gov. Greg Abbott promised that Democratic lawmakers who staged a walkout in Texas can be arrested. Chatting with KVUE on Monday, the two-term Republican criticized Democratic lawmakers who fled en masse to dam a number of conservative payments from passing in a legislative particular session. “As quickly as they arrive again within the state of Texas, they are going to be arrested, they are going to be cabined contained in the Texas Capitol till they get their job accomplished,” he stated. Democratic leaders within the Texas Home stated on Monday that that they had flown to Washington, DC, to “refuse to let the Republican-led legislature pressure by means of harmful laws that might trample on Texans’ freedom to vote.”

Underneath Texas regulation, two-thirds of lawmakers have to be current for legislative enterprise to proceed. Abbott convened the particular session earlier this month to go a litany of conservative priorities, together with laws focusing on voting, abortion entry, transgender rights, and demanding race principle. The marquee situation is a restrictive voting invoice that Republican lawmakers have sought largely in response to President Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden. The invoice would modify early-voting hours, curb the 24/7 voting facilities that had been common with shift staff in Democratic-leaning Harris County in final 12 months’s presidential election, and scrap straight-ticket voting, amongst different measures.