Tell Media summarises media reports on about former White House advisor on Covid and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who until 202 was the chief medical advisor to the president Anthony Fauci now admits closing schools during the pandemic was ill-advised.

Media reports also highlight the US governments’ abuse of power, including attacks on democracy, civil liberties and use of mass surveillance.

The Daily Wire reported:

Dr Anthony Fauci acknowledged on Tuesday that shuttering schools for months during the Covid-19 pandemic was a “mistake,” a reversal for the former presidential chief medical advisor who became influential in the nation’s response to the malady.

Fauci made the admission during an interview on CBS Mornings, saying that while the initial school closures were the right decision, keeping kids out of the classroom for so long was a mistake. Fauci said that “shutting down everything immediately … even schools was the right thing.”

“How long you kept it was the problem because there was a disparity throughout the country,” he said.

Previously, Fauci had warned that school shutdowns may be necessary, even ones that would last for months. School lockdowns caused massive learning loss across the country among K-12 students in public schools.

Surgeon General Murthy Advocates for Digital ID to Combat Online ‘Misinformation’ and Protect Youth

Reclaim the Net reported:

This time, the New York Times and US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy got together, with Murthy’s own slant on what opponents might see as another push to muzzle social media ahead of the November vote, under any pretext.

A pretext is, as per Murthy: new legislation that would “shield young people from online harassment, abuse and exploitation,” and there’s disinformation and such, of course.

Coming from Murthy, this is inevitably branded as “health disinformation.” But the way digital rights group EFF sees it – requiring “a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents” – is just unconstitutional.

Critics think this is no more than a thinly veiled campaign to unmask internet users under what the authorities believe is the platitude that cannot be argued against – “thinking of the children.”

KFF Health News reported:

It’s been nearly three months since the US government announced an outbreak of the bird flu virus on dairy farms. The World Health Organization considers the virus a public health concern because of its potential to cause a pandemic, yet the US has tested only about 45 people across the country.

“We’re flying blind,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the pandemic centre at the Brown University School of Public Health. With so few tests run, she said, it’s impossible to know how many farmworkers have been infected, or how serious the disease is. A lack of testing means the country might not notice if the virus begins to spread between people — the gateway to another pandemic.

“We’d like to be doing more testing. There’s no doubt about that,” said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC’s bird flu test is the only one the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized for use right now.

Shah said the agency has distributed these tests to about 100 public health labs in states. “We’ve got roughly a million available now,” he said, “and expect 1.2 million more in the next two months.”

But Nuzzo and other researchers are concerned because the CDC and public health labs aren’t generally where doctors order tests from. That job tends to be done by major clinical laboratories run by companies and universities, which lack authorisation for bird flu testing.

As the outbreak grows – with at least 114 herds infected in 12 states as of June 18 – researchers said the CDC and FDA are not moving fast enough to remove barriers that block clinical labs from testing. In one case, the diagnostics company Neelyx Labs was on hold with a query for more than a month.

Newsweek reported:

Soon, the US Supreme Court will release an opinion in NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, two controversial – and consequential – social media cases involving laws in Texas and Florida.

It is extremely important for the Court to get this case right. Social media operates as the modern public square. Social media platforms hold themselves out to be a public service, neutral in their administration of their policies. But this simply isn’t the case. They routinely engage in censorship of individuals and organisations that hold to ideologies they do not like.

Social media companies have often targeted conservative users, organisations and religious messages for censorship. By labelling the messages as “hate” or “misinformation,” social media companies silence conservative voices and stunt the free flow of information.

These platforms, under the guise of “standards” or “policies,” have repeatedly censored, deplatformed, and shadow-banned conservative viewpoints through selective application of ever-changing rules.

One of the pivotal questions the Court will have to address in NetChoice is what standards should govern social media companies. Are they purely private companies or are they a “common carrier”?

 In other words, do social media companies have their own free speech protections, or are they obligated to respect the free speech rights of their subscribers?

It is important that the Supreme Court get this right. Not just for today, but for generations to come. Truth – and our freedom – is at stake.

Reuters reported:

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education on Tuesday voted to ban smartphones for its 429,000 students in an attempt to insulate kids from distractions and social media that undermine learning and hurt mental health.

The board of the second-largest US school district voted 5-2, approving a resolution to develop within 120 days a policy prohibiting student use of cellphones and social media platforms. The policy would be in place by January 2025.

“I think we’re going to be on the vanguard here, and students and this entire city and country are going to benefit as a result,” said board member Nick Melvoin, who proposed the resolution.

On Monday, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label on social media platforms, akin to those on cigarette packages, citing what he considers a mental health emergency.

Los Angeles joins a number of smaller school districts to ban access to phones or social media. Florida, with some 2.8 million public school students, last year passed a law requiring school districts to prevent student access to social media. Several other states have introduced similar legislation.

Reuters reported:

The US Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday it had referred a complaint against the social media platform TikTok and its parent company ByteDance over potential violations of children’s privacy to the US Department of Justice.

In March, a source told Reuters the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could resolve a probe into TikTok over allegedly faulty privacy and data security practices by either filing suit or reaching a settlement.

Reuters in 2020 first reported the FTC and the Justice Department were looking into allegations the popular social media app failed to live up to a 2019 agreement aimed at protecting children’s privacy.

Newsweek reported:

A trial is currently underway in Canada, and the rights of every Canadian citizen are at stake.

Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert are facing farcical charges stemming from their participation in a peaceful protest against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s Covid-19 response.

It turns out, the US is not the only country where the ruling political establishment is using lawfare to test the limits of the freedoms we all once took for granted.

Olienick and Carbert may be average working-class men, but their trial is comparable to that of President Trump’s many legal battles; as in the US, the Canadian court system has been turned into a crucible upon which elite warfare is being waged against the masses – or their duly elected representatives.

Olienick and Carbert are the remaining two of a group of political prisoners arrested in Canada and held without bail since the Freedom Convoy in 2022. The Freedom Convoy was a populist revolt against Trudeau’s authoritarian approach to Covid-19 in the form of a mass act of civil protest led by truck drivers.

To combat this peaceful protest, the largest of its kind in Canadian history, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to suspend civil liberties across Canada, freezing bank accounts and laying numerous spurious charges against hundreds of peaceful protesters.

• A Tell / The Defender report