New Year... New Us

 

 

 

Be proud

Be strong

Be confident

Be safe

Be WHO YOU ARE !!! 

 

(and don't take any crap from ANYONE) 

 

Happy New Year to anyone that reads this.... 

YOU ALL MATTER TO ME.

 

 

 

 

Vaccinated US nurse contracts COVID-19, expert says Pfizer shot needed more time to work - ABC

Wed, December 30, 2020, 3:21 AM EST

(Reuters) - A nurse in California tested positive for COVID-19 more than a week after receiving Pfizer Inc's vaccine, an ABC News affiliate reported on Tuesday, but a medical expert said the body needs more time to build up protection.

Matthew W., 45, a nurse at two different local hospitals, said in a Facebook post on December 18 that he had received the Pfizer vaccine, telling the ABC News affiliate that his arm was sore for a day but that he had suffered no other side-effects.

Six days later on Christmas Eve, he became sick after working a shift in the COVID-19 unit, the report added. He got the chills and later came down with muscle aches and fatigue.

He went to a drive-up hospital testing site and tested positive for COVID-19 the day after Christmas, the report said.

Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist with Family Health Centers of San Diego, told the ABC News affiliate that this scenario was not unexpected.

"We know from the vaccine clinical trials that it's going to take about 10 to 14 days for you to start to develop protection from the vaccine," Ramers said.

"That first dose we think gives you somewhere around 50%, and you need that second dose to get up to 95%," Ramers added.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh and Akriti Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Gareth Jones)

 

Joe Biden refers to Kamala Harris as ‘president-elect’ ....( He's right.... people voted HER in office NOT him lol)

 

 

 

Joe Biden refers to Kamala Harris as ‘president-elect’

Gino Spocchia

Wed, December 30, 2020, 6:09 AM EST

US president-elect Joe Biden

(REUTERS)

Joe Biden accidentally referred to Kamala Harris as “president-elect” while speaking about the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking on Tuesday, the president-elect said he and vice president-elect Harris had taken Covid-19 vaccines publically to “instill confidence” in them, when he misspoke.

Ms Harris had received her vaccine dose publicly some hours earlier, as American lawmakers and officials try to build public trust in the vaccine programme.

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“I took it to instill confidence in the vaccine,” said Mr Biden, who was speaking from Wilmington, Delaware. He received a vaccine dose last week, also live on air.

“President-elect Harris took hers today for the same reason,” he then added, while accidentally referring to his running mate as the president-elect.

The 78-year-old has made the same mistake in the past, saying on the campaign trail several months ago that there would be a “Harris administration”.

Mr Biden, who will assume the United States presidency on 20 January, went on to warn that vaccines were being rolled-out too slowly by the Trump administration.

And at the current pace, said the president-elect, “it’s gonna take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people.”

“As I long feared and warned the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,” he added, while warning that “things will get worse before they get better”.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday, around 11.4 million vaccine doses have been distributed.

Joe Biden again says the quiet part out loud: “President-elect Harris” pic.twitter.com/e6kSlwDlnr

— Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) December 29, 2020

The Trump administration said this month that it would have 20 million doses distributed by the end of the year, which is now unlikely.

Responding to the president-elect’s criticism, the US president wrote on Twitter that “It is up to the States to distribute the vaccines”

The coronavirus has now claimed more than 336,000 American lives.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press.

 

Try to earrase my past..... then Your past is errased too. Stop bitching about what happened HUNDREDS of years ago

 

 

 

Pull down statues, change names ???

 

Fine then YOUR past never happened either.

 

NOW WE'RE EQUAL.

 

 

 

Viral video of Chicago house party reveals disconnect between black youth and media during coronavirus. ‘Dialogue needs to happen about what we’re going to do to keep black Americans alive.’

By Darcel Rockett

Chicago Tribune |

Apr 29, 2020 at 7:29 PM

House parties are meant to be a thing of the past now that COVID-19 has turned into a pandemic.

But on April 25, a viral video showed a gathering of dozens of people in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Galewood at a memorial party for two friends who died of gun violence years ago. The video drew such a level of nationwide vitriol on social media that Mayor Lori Lightfoot blasted the revelers as “foolish and reckless,” and Gov. J.B. Pritzker criticized the partygoers for “putting everyone around you in danger.” (Tribune columnist, Dahleen Glanton, wrote an open letter to the black kids who partied, citing the reality of killing loved ones “without even knowing that you are carrying a weapon.”) Chicago police have subsequently said they cited the homeowner with disorderly conduct Monday.

A screenshot from the now viral Chicago house party in city's Galewood neighborhood that occurred during the stay at home order. (YouTube)

With so much conversation about the event, The Triibe, a digital media platform that tells stories of black Chicago, sought to find the disconnect between local government officials, black youth and traditional media outlets in conveying the serious nature of the coronavirus. In her article, Veronica Harrison (aka Vee L. Harrison), talks to a young woman at the party. The woman told Harrison she knows COVID-19 is serious, but she’s not letting fear win out over her faith.

The partygoer told Harrison: “I get irritated with these celebrities trying to tell us to stay in the house. Us people that aren’t as rich as them, we don’t have nothing to do in the house. Sometimes this can cause you to go into boredom and depression and you have to get out, you have to get some air.”

Harrison said her phone has not left her hand since the Triibe story went live Tuesday night.

Man apologizes for throwing Chicago house party caught on video that went viral, says he was honoring 2 slain friends and didn’t realize health risks of packed crowd »

“The story’s momentum, we did not expect, and such vivid conversations and the range of responses between age and socioeconomic categories,” she said. “I believe that we are in a space and time where the generational divide and the poison in that is really plaguing our country, literally killing us. Because we can’t see eye to eye, it’s hard to understand how people are surviving this. ... The boomers want to blame the millennials and the millennials want to blame the folks underneath them. We’re doing a lot of finger-wagging and we’re not coming up with solutions and keeping people alive.”

Illinois State Rep. LaShawn Ford, in an attempt to find solutions, held a Facebook Live conversation on Tuesday with the host of the house party, Janeal Wright, 26. The intervention was seen as a teachable moment, according to Ford. He supports Wright, even though he said it wasn’t a popular move, because supporting him will make sure that he doesn’t do something like it again when social distancing is necessary. It’s all in the vein of “if you know better, you do better.”

“He’s a good young man; he just made a bonehead decision,” Ford said in a phone interview. “Look, if the president of the United States can make the stupid comments about bleach and Lysol injecting and the vice president can go into a hospital without a mask, but this young man who is less than a third of their age and doesn’t have the experience that they have, we’re going to nail him? No. Absolutely not. We’re going to help him and he’s going to be better from it and we’re going to connect with the young population and not further divide us with them.”

West Side House Party

Live with the young man that hosted House Party in Chicago.

Posted by La Shawn K Ford on Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Ford said he and Wright are working on pointing party attendees to get tested for the coronavirus at Loretto Hospital. Ford said he’s working on creating a video with Wright to get the message out to the young population about the importance of adhering to the stay-at-home order and maintaining social distancing.

During the Facebook Live conversation, Wright told Ford that he, like most young people, doesn’t watch the news because there’s a lot of talk about people of color getting killed. Young people disengaged with the news is one form of the disconnect between black youth and traditional mediums of communication, says Harrison.

Sona Smith, executive director at Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, says residents in typically under-resourced communities were already in survival mode prior to COVID-19, and the virus just adds another layer that may seem less immediate.

“There is a historical and deep seated distrust that we have with things related to government, the medical system, policing — you name it,” said the Bronzeville resident. “The Lori Lightfoot memes and things like that makes (coronavirus) more relatable and it connects to the younger audience, but there’s so much healing that needs to take place between all the people within those marginalized communities and these systems that now we have to trust; that we have to rely on for our updates and to tell us what to do next.”

Smith said trust doesn’t come because we are in the middle of a pandemic. “You can get the message out in a million different avenues, but if the people don’t trust the source of that message, it’s not going to resonate.”

Ford saw the Facebook discussion as an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive and to give youth like Wright and his partygoer friends a voice. Harrison said she is brainstorming with people like Ford to build a coalition to give black youth a place to vent their concerns, since what exists now seems to be missing the mark.

Harrison said her article’s goal was to create a conversation.

It did.

“It’s creating this narrative that people were either afraid to approach or people haven’t thought about, and, either way, I’m good with that,” she said. “If we don’t move the needle in how we’re sharing these stories, we’ll continue to lose lives specifically in Chicago, specifically in black communities. I think right now, dialogue needs to happen about what we’re going to do to keep black Americans alive.”

drockett@chicagotribune.com

 

black church, black entertainment channel, black this black that..... the world would be at war if anything was called white or brown

 

 

 

 

Now who is the one separating?

 

 

 

 

Black Women Democrats Are Pushing Joe Biden to Cancel $50,000 of Loan Debt per Borrower, Citing Increasing Racial Inequality

Anne Branigin

Fri, December 18, 2020, 9:30 AM EST

As the nation waits for congressional lawmakers to reach a resolution on a second stimulus bill—nine months after the coronavirus pandemic began disrupting the lives of Americans around the country—a group of Black female House Democrats is challenging President-elect Joe Biden to offer more substantial relief to student loan borrowers.

The charge comes in the form of a resolution, introduced by Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alma Adams (D-NC) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), reports Vox. The resolution calls for the incoming Biden administration to take a more aggressive stance on cutting student loan debt by forgiving up to $50,000 in federal debt for student borrowers. A companion piece to a Senate resolution put forward by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) earlier this year, the resolution makes the case that student debt forgiveness is a critical tool in tackling racial inequality.

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“The student debt crisis is a racial and economic justice issue and we must finally begin to address it as such,” Pressley said in a statement. “Broad-based student debt cancellation is precisely the kind of bold, high-impact policy that the broad and diverse coalition that elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris expect them to deliver.”

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Pressley argued that canceling student debt is “one of the most effective ways to provide direct relief to millions, help reduce the racial wealth gap, stimulate our economy, and begin to deliver an equitable and just recovery.”

Waters, chairwoman of the House Finance Committee, echoed the need for debt forgiveness amid a pandemic and a lagging economy that has seen massive job losses.

“I cannot overstate the importance of this resolution and the need for the Biden Administration to take bold action and deliver on this mandate from the people on day one,” said Waters.

As The Root has reported over the years, student loan debt disproportionately affects African American borrowers. The reasons are myriad: A 2016 Atlantic article found Black grads had less debt compared to their non-Black peers shortly after receiving their undergraduate diplomas. However, their debt ballooned in the years after. Four years after graduating, Black grads saw nearly double the amount of debt of white, Asian and Latinx students.

This is in part because more Black graduates continue their studies after receiving their bachelor’s degree, and because they have a higher rate of attending predatory for-profit institutions, which put them further in debt without actually advancing their employment options. Graduates of historically Black colleges and universities have also been found to accrue higher debt burdens than those who do not attend HBCUs.

Undergirding all of this is an increasingly disparate racial wealth gap, made possible in part by what National Employment Law Project Director Rebecca Dixon describes to The Root as a “Jim Crow job market,” in which Black workers disproportionately work lower-wage jobs than their white counterparts and—particularly for Black women—are paid less than their peers in those professions.

“Student debt cancellation would be a massive economic stimulus at a time when people desperately need it. It’s also a racial equity issue. Students of color are more likely to take out federal student loans, and face higher rates of default,” pointed out Rep. Omar, who worked with Pressley earlier this on a plan to drastically reduce student debt.

“Over 90 percent of student debt is held by the federal government, which President-elect Joe Biden can cancel with the stroke of a pen,” said Omar.

As Vox notes, Biden has supported legislation to cancel $10,000 in federal student loan debt, but lawmakers and activists who helped put him in office are urging the president-elect to forgive greater amounts of student debt—if not canceling it entirely.

Those who oppose student debt forgiveness say such a policy wouldn’t actually help the people who most need it, citing that much of America’s student loan debt is held by households with graduate degrees, as the Brookings Institution found. Policy experts also note that student loan forgiveness alone cannot fix wealth and educational inequity, but must be coupled with larger changes to higher education in order to prevent upcoming graduates from sliding back into debt again.

But those reasons are not enough to deny debt relief to millions of Americans who desperately need it, say proponents of student debt forgiveness. Rep. Adams pointed out that this debt has stymied the purchasing power and mobility of many Americans.

“These loans are holding American families back from buying houses, cars, and opening small businesses,” she continued. “Student loan debt prevents young families from building and creating wealth that they can pass down to their children and grandchildren—a freedom that historically has been denied to Black Americans in this country.”