(FREE) PAINE IN THE MORNING: 13 things you need to know this Thursday – January 20, 2022

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England Ends All COVID Passports, Mask Mandates, Work Restrictions – Restrictions including COVID-19 passes, mask mandates, and work-from-home requirements will be removed in England, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday. Johnson also suggested that self-isolation rules may also be thrown out at the end of March as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic becomes endemic.

Effective immediately, the UK government is no longer asking people to work from home. The COVID pass mandate for nightclubs and large events won’t be renewed when it expires on Jan. 26. And from Thursday, indoor mask-wearing will no longer be compulsory anywhere in England. – READ MORE

Oregon Officials Float Making Indoor Mask Mandate Permanent – Oregon’s health officials are considering making the indoor mask mandate permanent, which requires everyone age five and older to wear a mask in indoor public spaces.

Currently, the Oregon Health Authority’s rule requires individuals, even the fully vaccinated, to wear “masks, face coverings or face shields” in “all indoor spaces.” That includes “public and private workplaces, businesses, indoor areas open to the public, building lobbies, common or shared spaces, classrooms, elevators, bathrooms, transportation services and other indoor space where people may gather for any purpose,” according to the rule, which is set to expire in February. Because of that, health officials are expected to “propose making it permanent in order to allow the mandate to remain in place indefinitely,” according to Newsweek. – READ MORE

Early Omicron Breakthroughs Show MRNA Vaccines’ Weakness – Booster shots with messenger RNA vaccines such as those made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE failed to block omicron in a study of some of the first documented breakthrough cases caused by the highly contagious variant. – READ MORE

Belgium No Longer Recommending Moderna Vaccine For Those Under 31 Due To Risk Of Heart Inflammation – The nation of Belgium will no longer be recommending the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine for citizens under the age of 31, after data shows that using it for the first or second dose of vaccination may cause heart inflammation such as myocarditis. The decision was announced last week by the Belgian Vaccination Task Force.

According to The Brussels Times, Danish studies indicate “that vaccination with Moderna resulted in an increased risk of inflammation of the heart muscle in young men following the first or second dose in comparison with the Pfizer vaccine,” for those between the ages of 12 and 39. – READ MORE

Carhartt: An Unvaxxed Workforce Is A Risk ‘Our Company Is Unwilling To Take’ –Carhartt, the popular United States manufacturer of durable work gear, sent an e-mail to its 5,500 workers notifying them that they had to receive the COVID-19 vaccine by February 15 in order to continue working for the company. The announcement came a day after the recent United States Supreme Court decision which effectively ended President Joe Biden’s private-sector vaccine mandate for large employers nationwide.

Carhartt CEO Mark Valade sent an email stating that all employees had to be vaccinated by February 15, or find a new job. – READ MORE

US murder rate highest it’s been in 25 years as big cities shatter records – The 2021 United States murder rate is estimated to be nearly as high as it was in 25 years ago, when more than 19,600 people were killed nationwide, according to statistics shared in a recent report.

The murder rate was estimated to be 6.9 murders per 100,000 people in 2021 – just 0.5 lower than the 1996 murder rate of 7.4, according to FBI data examined by data analyst Jeff Asher and shared by the New York Times. It’s the closest the nation has come to the high-crime scourge of the early 90s. – READ MORE

Suspect Identified in the Stabbing of Brianna Kupfer, Out on $1k Bail – A suspect has been identified in the murder of 24-year-old UCLA design student Brianna Kupfer: 31-year-old Shawn Laval Smith.

A $250,000 reward has been offered for the capture of Smith, who police consider armed and dangerous. He will likely be using public transit. – READ MORE

‘At The Edge Of A Cliff’: Trucking Industry Leader Says ‘Rewarding People’ Not To Work, Vaccine Mandates Are Worsening Supply Chain – American Trucking Associations chief executive Chris Spear warned that several economic bottlenecks — including vaccine mandates — are threatening an industry already at the “edge of a cliff.”

During an interview with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, Spear said that one obstacle facing the industry is “a year of policies” that involved “rewarding people not to return to work.” He pointed to a “chronic shortage of talent, not just in trucking where we’re short 81,000 drivers, but across every sector of employment.” – READ MORE

Experts Are Warning That Empty Shelves And Food Shortages Are Going To Continue For Many Weeks To Come – The term “return to normal” is being thrown around a lot these days, but will things ever truly return to the way that they were before the pandemic came along? I don’t think so.

From an economic standpoint, an extraordinary amount of lasting damage has been done over the past two years. A seemingly endless list of major problems has thrown thousands upon thousands of critical supply chains into a complete and utter state of chaos, and this has resulted in some very painful shortages. For quite a while, the mainstream media kept insisting that the shortages would soon be gone, but now they are being forced to admit the truth. If you can believe it, NPR has even published a major story about the growing shortages in this country… – READ MORE

Misery Index: Biden’s Economic Policies Are Clearly Failing Average and Poor Americans – Each month economists use the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data in an attempt to gauge the health of the economy. By adding the current U.S. unemployment rate of 3.90% to the current rate of U.S. inflation of 7.04%, economists quantify the economic well-being of the country into the U.S. Misery Index. In turn, the Misery Index is used to gauge how average Americans are weathering the ups and downs of the U.S. economy under the Biden/Harris administration’s economic policies. – READ MORE

Four Red States Recover All Pre-Recession Jobs As Many Blue States Are Still ‘Lagging Behind’ – Four states — Texas, Arizona, Idaho, and Utah — have seen full recovery in their labor markets following COVID-19 and the lockdown-induced recession.

“Texas and Arizona have joined two other states in recovering all the jobs they lost at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, leading a trend that is expected to include another dozen states by the middle of this year,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. “The states, which also include Utah and Idaho, have benefited from demographic shifts before and during the pandemic — experiencing outsize payroll growth in retail, warehousing, technology and transportation industries.” – READ MORE

Communist Cash Bonanza: Consumer Spending on China’s TikTok Jumped 77% in 2021 – Users reportedly spent around $2.3 billion on the popular Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok last year, according to a recent report. This represents an astounding 77 percent increase from the previous year. TikTok also surpassed 3 billion global installations, the first app to do so since Facebook.

Pandaily reports that users sent around $2.3 billion on the popular video-sharing app TikTok last year, according to recently released information from Sensor Tower. This includes transactions made on the iOS version of TikTok’s Chinese counterpart app Douyin which is more heavily censored in order to align with Chinese law. – READ MORE

Facebook Patents Reveal Mark Zuckerberg’s Plan to Turn the Metaverse into a Money Machine – Recent patents filed by Facebook (now Meta) reveal how the company plans to generate profit from its metaverse virtual reality platform. According to the patents, Facebook plans to track everything from eye movements to nose twitches as its users explore the new platform.

The Financial Times reports that a number of patents filed by Facebook, including tech to track eye movements, body positions, nose twitching, and facial expressions, reveal how the company plans to monetize its metaverse virtual landscape. – READ MORE