United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy rocket scrubbed its first launch in over 19 months Thursday, involving a clandestine mission to deploy a surveillance satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office.

The mission, designated NRO Launch 44 (NROL-44), will mark the first Delta IV mission since the Medium+ variant of the rocket was retired in August 2019 and the first Delta IV Heavy since January 2019. Although ULA is phasing out the Delta IV in favor of its Vulcan rocket, the Heavy configuration has five contracted missions through 2024.

New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced this week indoor dining will be opening — sometime next year.

This one clown is destroying New York City.
That’s what you get when you vote in a Marxist.

Of course, there is nothing scientific about his plan.
But it will ruin New York City forever.

Scientists have created an army of microscopic four-legged robots too small to see with the naked eye that walk when stimulated by a laser and could be injected into the body through hypodermic needles, a study said Wednesday.

Microscopic robotics are seen as having an array of potential uses, particularly in medicine, and US researchers said the new robots offer "the potential to explore biological environments".

One of the main challenges in the development of these cell-sized robots has been combining control circuitry and moving parts in such a small structure.

Germany will end mandatory coronavirus tests for travelers returning from high-risk areas abroad and again focus its testing strategy on people with symptoms or possible exposure to COVID-19 patients, the country’s health minister said Wednesday.

Health Minister Jens Spahn said that over the summer vacation period the number of virus tests performed in Germany nearly doubled, to 900,000 per week, in part to identify people who caught the virus during trips abroad.

People coming home from coronavirus risk areas were offered free tests at airports, train stations and highway stops, allowing them to cut short the required two-week quarantine if their result came back negative.

Amid his confirmation that he "shut the nation down" if scientists told him too, Joe Biden explained just what the Trump admin had got wrong (and how to 'fix' it)...

"In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”

Well the good news is... as the following five charts from John Merline's Issues & Insights blog show, the US is 'beating' the virus...

A lake the size of five football fields in Hawaii’s K?lauea volcano is one of the world’s hottest bodies of water, according to a volcano alert issued by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

A thermal camera used to measure the lake’s water surface temperature reveals that it is between 176 and 185 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the USGS, very few volcanic lakes around the world have surface temperatures greater than 176 degrees Fahrenheit.

Attorneys Bijan Esfandiari, Nicole K. H. Maldonado, Michael L. Baum, co-counsel Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and local counsel Christopher E. Hultquist of Hultquist Law in Providence, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island on behalf of Ms. Balasco, who alleges her vaccine injuries were so severe and debilitating, she was physically unable to attend most of high school. The case number is 1:20-cv 00364.

Hurricane Laura is rapidly intensifying over the Gulf of Mexico and expected to strike the upper Texas or southwest Louisiana coasts as a major hurricane late Wednesday or early Thursday. Life-threatening storm surge and destructive winds will batter the region and a threat of flooding rain and strong winds will extend well inland.

Laura has strengthened again, this time to 105 mph, a Category 2 hurricane, as of early Wednesday morning.

Coronavirus cases linked to the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota last week have now reached across state lines to Nebraska, public health officials said.

At least seven Covid-19 cases in Nebraska’s Panhandle region have been tied to the rally, Kim Engel, director of the Panhandle Public Health District, confirmed in an email to CNN.

The department said that contact tracing had been completed, and it declined to comment further.

The cases that have appeared in Nebraska are the latest to be connected to the 80th annual Sturgis motorcycle rally, which took place August 7-16.

Remember when the 'experts' warned that there was no credible evidence of coronavirus reinfection, claiming the notion that patients can be reinfected with the virus is categorically absurd? Well, since then, it looks like the New York Times has published stories arguing everything from 'reinfection is so rare as to make it a non-issue', to signs that 'lasting protection might be elusive for some'.

It's just one more sign of how little scientists know about the virus, and the latest reminder that projections for workable mass-produced vaccines that are also "safe" is an incredibly high bar to set before the end of the year.

Brown Dwarfs are objects in space situated in weight between the lightest stars and the largest gas giants, although they have failed to sustain nuclear fusion using the hydrogen in their cores, as normal stars do.

An ensemble of citizen scientists have discovered 95 "cool worlds" close to the sun - celestial objects, known as brown dwarfs, that are larger than planets and are of a lighter weight than stars, a new study reveals.

Published in the Astrophysical Journal and on an arXiv.org preprint server, the research reveals that "previously unrecognized substellar neighbors to the sun" have been identified by the citizen scientist project 'Backyard Worlds: Planet 9'.

Astronomers researching the mysterious Fast Radio Burst (FRB) 121102 have confirmed that the powerful phenomenon has a predictable cycle, which may allow us to find out what exactly is causing it once and for all.

First discovered in 2012, the FRB is located in a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away making it very difficult to monitor, requiring some of Earth’s most powerful instruments.

FRBs are intense blasts of radio waves which can release as much power as hundreds of millions of suns in mere milliseconds, but the majority of them that we have observed have flared once only to disappear, never to be heard from again.

This makes it extremely difficult to discover their composition, monitor their behavior and determine their source. In other words, they are extraordinarily difficult to study let alone predict as scientists have just managed.

According to a new Canadian university project, physics is “a mirror of colonial patterns and social inequality,” particularly “in the context of light.” This is all not just baffling, but dangerously bonkers.

In the light of Black Lives Matter and the decision by Oriel College at Oxford University to move its statue of Sir Cecil Rhodes, the idea of “decolonising” education has made serious headway, with many institutions now reworking curricula to better reflect diversity and black and ethnic minority concerns.

There are plenty of problems with that outlook. It suggests that ethnic minority writers and thinkers should be included in college courses because of the colour of their skin, rather than the brilliance of their ideas. It also suggests that students can only really learn if education is “relevant” to them. After decades of fighting for equality, it seems we are now re-racialising society. Worse, this re-racialisation is seen as progressive.

A treasure trove, including hundreds of gold coins dating back to around 1,100 years ago, has been discovered during excavations in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The collection of 425 early Islamic, 24-carat gold coins was unearthed by teenage volunteers on August 18 during an excavation in the occupied territories.

The coins have been found in an area which once housed the Palestinian village of Yibna, which had a population of 5,420 in 1948. However, it was taken by Israeli forces on 4 June 1948, and was depopulated during the occupation and expulsion.

The gold coins date back to the late 9th century at the height of the once-powerful Abbasid Caliphate, which controlled a lion's share of the Near East and North Africa.

Testing irregularities at one of the labs used by the NFL led to 77 positives for COVID-19 among players and staff members from multiple teams Saturday.

NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport and NFL Network's Tom Pelissero reported that all 77 original tests were rerun Sunday night, and every single one came back negative, per sources informed of the situation.

All 77 individuals also underwent additional point-of-care tests. Each came back negative as well.

Tropical Storm Laura could strengthen quickly into a major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico with a dangerous threat of storm surge along parts of the Louisiana and Texas coasts, and threats of flooding rain and strong winds extending well inland later in the week.

Current Conditions
Laura is currently centered near western Cuba. Flooding rainfall and gusty winds will continue in parts of Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands today. Some bands on the outer periphery of Laura's circulation have also rotated through the Florida Keys Monday.

Official coronavirus cases in the U.S. have resumed falling fairly briskly, with the 7-day running average now down 37% since July 25.

I was asked for comments by Sputnik News the other day about Democratic Nominee Joe Biden’s assertion he would lock down the entire country if the scientists told him to.

As you can imagine I didn’t hold back.

The idea that the scientists who have been the most vocal in advising President Trump and the other world leaders, would give Biden the honest answer about how to deal with COVID-19 at this point is beyond laughable.

I’m sorry but the official arbiters of “Science!” have done nothing but lie, delay, obfuscate and oversell the threat of this virus. And their miscommunication, intentional, well-meaning, or just incompetent, has cost humanity hundreds of billions if not trillions in accumulated wealth and time.

Those things translate directly into lives lost, opportunities destroyed.

Has Biden not looked around and seen the multiplying protests worldwide against these idiotic and tyrannical lock downs?

Readers may recall two tropical depressions (Tropical Depression 13 and 14) were upgraded to Tropical Storm Laura and Marco last week. We outlined how these two storms, traversing the Gulf of Mexico, had to be carefully observed over the weekend, for strengthening and trajectory.

Long-term tracking models for both storms haven't significantly changed over the last several days. Spaghetti models suggest the storms will make landfall early next week between Texas and Alabama.

As of Sunday afternoon, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) declared Tropical Storm Marco a Category 1 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph. The storm is 300 miles south-southeast of the Mississippi River, with expected landfall Monday afternoon.

A British academic and advisor to HMG warned Saturday during an interview that the coronavirus might be with us "forever" even if a vaccine is quickly developed.

"This is not going to be a disease like Smallpox, which could be eradicated by vaccination. This is a virus that is going to be with us forever in some form or another," said Professor Mark Walport.

Pressed on whether he agrees with projections from WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said Friday that he hoped the pandemic would be over in under two years, but that the possibility of a more sustained outbreak is something that can't yet be readily dismissed, Walport claimed that tackling the virus will depend on a successful vaccine, but that mass production of a workable vaccine won't be the last step toward fighting the virus.

Did you know that an asteroid just flew by our planet at an extremely close distance? The good news is that it was only about the size of a car, but the bad news is that NASA had absolutely no idea that it was coming.

In fact, NASA only discovered it about six hours after it had passed us. If NASA could not see that asteroid coming straight at us, what else is heading toward us that they cannot see? It has been estimated that “about 17,000 big near-Earth asteroids remain undetected”, but the truth is that we don’t really know how many giant space rocks are floating around out there. Of course, scientists all around the world are doing their best to catalog new potential threats all the time, but what most people don’t realize is that this is an area where our technology is still very limited.

The Helix Nebula from Blanco and Hubble

With the NASA Perseverance rover on its way to the Red Planet, NASA is getting ready for the next major step in Mars exploration — a sample return mission.

NASA recently established a Mars Sample Return Program Independent Review Board to evaluate how to safely bring Martian rocks and materials back to Earth, the agency said in a statement Friday (Aug. 14).

The statement comes in the wake of the Perseverance rover launch to Mars last month to pick up and cache rock samples that could show signs of past Martian life. The nuclear-powered rover will land on Feb. 18, 2021.

Is “Sweden” a banned word now?

I’ll guess we’ll find out.

Why Sweden succeeded and the rest of the world failed – and how you are not being told about it.

Take the dark-tech of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), its civilian counterpart BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research & Development), the stealth-ness of nanotechnology, the Gates Foundation funded “Quantum Dot Tattoo” aka “mark of the beast,” and combine it with micro-needling as an inoculation platform that is conceived from how snakes inject their venom into their prey, and nanogels that can connect with external technologies outside your body like smart phones, the cloud or other smart devices (5G from satellites), and what do you have? Answer: Moderna’s new RNA vaccine against COVID-19 coronavirus.

After the Utah Legislature refused to extend an expiring state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Gary Herbert on Thursday issued a new emergency declaration himself.

That is needed to allow dealing quickly with issues arising from COVID-19, he said, and to avoid the possibility of losing hundreds of millions of dollars of federal emergency relief.

A vast ‘life raft’ made of floating rock has made landfall in Queensland Australia, having emerged from an underwater volcano in the Pacific last year. Scientists believe it could resurrect portions of the Great Barrier Reef.

Ben Carson and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell pushed the toxic floral extract as a COVID-19 ‘cure’ to the White House: report

The Annals of Internal Medicine just published a comprehensive new study on how contagious the COVID-19 virus is. And I’m sorry to report that the case for a number of popular new practices that seem to have filled some spiritual need a lot of Americans have for self-abasement just completely collapsed.

The list of practices no longer having any conceivable rationale includes:

Your brain, with a USB-C port in it. That’s Elon Musk’s vision for Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI). In a controversial July 2019 white paper he claimed that his company Neuralink had taken a huge step towards building a “scalable high-bandwidth BMI system” that would let the human brain “stream full broadband electrophysiology data” to a network, using a combination of ultra-fine polymer probes, a neurosurgical robot that sews them into the brain, and custom high-density electronics.

A “single USB-C cable provides full-bandwidth data streaming from the device” the paper noted: the device having been stitched, in theory, to your cerebral cortex. Neuroscientists were varying shades of intrigued, appalled and dismissive: the custom hardware would only pick up noise, they suggested: interpretation of brain waves simply wasn’t that advanced; the ethical issues were pronounced; the body would reject this level of intervention; where was the peer review of the paper?

For those fearing that all the prior state-enforced social distancing and lockdown protocol which hit a peak in early summer — from arresting surfers on empty beaches, to telling people they can't even jog, to police detaining moms for merely letting their children play on taxpayer bought public playgrounds — would only too easily and hastily transition to a forced vaccination regimen the moment one is rushed out despite safety or the various potential long-term side effect 'unknowns'... well,it's happening:

Australians are likely to face mandatory coronavirus vaccinations if Prime Minister Scott Morrison gets his wish.

The nation is a step closer to gaining access to a vaccine, with the Federal Government securing an international deal to produce a vaccine frontrunner locally if trials succeed.

If that happens, Mr Morrison expects Australians will have to undergo mandatory vaccination.

Japan's asteroid-sampling mission is officially clear to return its precious cargo to Australia in December, according to statements from both countries' governments.

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft is trekking back to Earth with a sample capsule full of material snagged from a near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which runs the mission, has long planned to deposit that capsule in the vast desert of Australia, but the new announcement marks that country's official approval of the plan.

Health authorities have finally admitted that they transferred patients back to nursing homes after they were found to have the virus. This almost certainly caused the deaths of others and manslaughter charges should follow.

We've known for some time now that the failure to protect residents in care homes for the elderly has been a major factor in coronavirus death tolls in many parts of the world. But a recent newspaper report has added a new dimension to the scandal.

Here in Scotland, as in other parts of the UK, there has been outrage that elderly people in hospital were discharged into care homes without being tested for Covid-19 in a desperate rush to clear hospital beds. That seems incredibly negligent. But now we have confirmation that patients were sent to care homes after testing positive for Covid-19. That seems downright criminal.

Criticism by Western scientists of Russia’s Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine is motivated by competition. That’s according to the Vice President of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, who says they’re upset when they’re lagging behind Russia.

Vladimir Chekhonin said he did not think this situation would last too long. “A vaccine will soon be registered in China. I am sure it will be done within two or three weeks,” the academy’s vice president predicted, adding that such a vaccine would also be registered in the United States by the year’s end.

Several US states, as well as a California-based nonprofit, have taken legal action against a recent Trump administration decision authorizing the railway transportation of up to 30,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per tank car. Ships that carry the substance have been described by one state attorney general as “floating bombs.”

Environmental public interest organization Earthjustice announced on Tuesday that it had filed a petition for review against the US Department of Transportation and its Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) over the recent federal decision to allow the bulk transportation of LNG in rail tank cars, effective August 24.

Lawmakers raised the case for closure days after the international Red Cross canceled its visit to Guantanamo Bay, citing concerns over the pandemic.

Lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) denounced the Department of Defense’s response to their earlier letter, in which they demanded to know specifics regarding the government’s plan to keep Covid-19 from spreading in the facility, where a number of medically vulnerable detainees are being held indefinitely.

In addition to the prison being “inconsistent with our values” and doing nothing to keep Americans safer, the senators said Monday, the Pentagon’s lack of transparency regarding containment and mitigation methods makes it clear that Guantanamo Bay must no longer be used to detain people captured over the last two decades as part of the “War on Terror,” the majority of whom have not been charged with a crime.

SOURCE: OFF-GUARDIAN.ORG

The idea of science is now a badly corrupted idea. In a nation, today, (the USA) which in educational terms ranks 25th globally in science skills and reading, and well below that in math; all one hears is a clarion call to science. In reading skills the US placed below Malta, Portugal, and right about the same as Kazakhstan.

The US jobless rate just hit 2.1 million. Officially. Making the total something over forty million. Its much higher in reality. Nobody has work. There is no work and we are at the start of a period of massive evictions, foreclosures, and delinquencies — and the homeless population will soon reach Biblical proportions (in some cities, such as Los Angeles, its already Biblical). Will be simply of a magnitude never before seen.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Authorities in Melbourne, Australia will use high-tech surveillance drones to catch people outside not wearing masks as well as to scan for vehicles that are in violation of curfew by being more than 5 km from home.

The drones will also be used to ensure skate parks and playgrounds remain empty.

The surveillance devices can be flown up to a distance of 7km and produce images so clear they can “read a vehicle’s number plate from 500 meters away.”

Privacy advocates are concerned that there is no sunset clause on the use of such technology and the drones could continue to be used to spy on citizens after the pandemic ends.

7 News Melbourne spoke to two residents who said they weren’t worried because they were behaving and had “nothing to hide.”

Since early summer, devastating floods have wreaked havoc in southern China due to torrential rains caused by the rainy season, with most of the flooding observed around the Yangtze basin and its tributaries.

China's largest river, the Yangtze, continues to rise to dangerous levels after another round of rainfall. More than 100,000 people on Tuesday, in the Sichuan province, were evacuated from their homes, reported Reuters.

Some 63 million people have been affected by the floods, with economic damage totaling $26 billion.

A red alert was issued late Tuesday by the water commission, who said some monitoring stations along the river were expected to rise above flood protection levels. The ministry also warned about the Three Gorges Dam, indicating water inflow levels continued to increase, with water inflows registering 74,000 cubic meters per second on Wednesday, the highest ever.

Uganda, a country in east-central Africa, has a 2018 population of 42.729 million, which is 13% of the United States’ population of 328.239 million in 2019.

And yet Uganda has 1,603 COVID-19 cases and just 15 deaths, wherease the U.S. has 5,656,744 COVID-19 cases and 175,105 deaths. That means:

Uganda’s number of COVID-19 cases is only 0.028% of the number of U.S. COVID-19 cases; and Uganda’s number of COVID-19 deaths is only 0.008% of the number of U.S. COVID-19 deaths.

Judicial Watch announced today it received 165 pages of records from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showing the FDA between 2012 and 2018 entered into eight contracts worth $96,370 with Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR) to acquire “fresh and never frozen” tissue from 1st and 2nd trimester aborted fetuses for use in creating “humanized mice” for ongoing research.

ABR is a non-profit firm which has been the subject of criminal referrals from House and Senate committees investigating whether Planned Parenthood or any other entity was illegally profiting from the handling of fetal tissue from aborted babies.

Federal law regulates the purchase and acceptance of human fetal tissue for research purposes. It is unlawful to knowingly transfer fetal tissue for profit.

By now we’ve all gotten the message: you’re selfish if you’d like to do the kinds of things that once gave your life meaning.

For these people, life is about nothing but the avoidance of death.

Virtually everything you’ve looked forward to has been canceled, and nobody will tell you when you can have those things back. “When we have a vaccine,” comes the raving lunatic’s answer.

Nobody was giving you that answer when they were pushing “15 days to flatten the curve.” They didn’t dare.

I still can’t get over the creepy spectacle of Dr. Marc Siegel, a New York University professor of medicine, vehemently hawking “No Hugs Please” buttons for all schoolchildren last week.

“Let’s give our kids all of these pins, ‘No Hugs Please,'” Dr. Siegel urged Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Let’s show our kids courage. They’re looking to parents for leadership,” he insisted. “Vaccines are gonna emerge, we’re gonna beat this thing, and then this” — Dr. Siegel waved his yellow badge — “goes in the garbage!”

The former White House physician to Presidents Obama and Trump says 'something is not right' with former VP Joe Biden.

"The best way I can describe every time I see him is that he's just lost," said Dr. Ronny Jackson - who recently won a GOP congressional primary in Texas.

"I won't make any particular diagnosis about dementia ... but what I will say is that something is not right" he continued, according to Just the News.

While Jackson admits he hasn't personally viewed Biden's medical file, he's witnessed the Democratic frontrunner's cognitive decline.

"I saw him frequently around the West Wing and other places like that. I know he's always been prone to gaffes, but these aren't gaffes anymore. He can't form sentences. Sometimes, he can't complete a thought," said Jackson, who is quoted in an upcoming book by Donald Trump Jr., "Liberal Privilege: Joe Biden and the Democrats' Defense of the Indefensible."

Unsealed documents obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch reveal that the Trump administration recently stopped a series of Obama-era contracts between the Planned Parenthood-affiliated group Advanced Bioscience Resources, Inc. (ABR) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which were being used to supply aborted baby parts for experimentation into “humanized mice (HM)”.

The contracts specified ‘fresh and never frozen’ baby parts from the first and second trimesters, totaling almost $100,000. In an email from June 28, 2017, an FDA employee whose name has been redacted inquired into ABR’s pricing of aborted fetal parts.

“I am tasked with the purchase of tissues suitable for [humanized mice] research. I would like to request a quote. Please review the Statement of Work and quote your pricing as outlined.” – FDA Employee

The COVID-19 pandemic has hastened the left's ruining of science. This had already begun with the left's attacks on "objectivity," the most essential value in science -- the very thing that makes science possible. The left declares objectivity, which it now puts in quotation marks, a characteristic of white supremacy.

Geologists began expressing concerns about the magnetic field that shields Earth from deadly solar radiation in 2019, when the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was forced to update its World Magnetic Model a year early after finding that the magnetic north pole was rapidly moving out of the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is tracking an immense, growing, and slowly splitting "dent" in the Earth's Magnetic field.

The area, known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, is situated in the southern hemisphere between South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean off the coast of southwestern Africa. According to recent NASA monitoring and modeling, the area is expanding westward and becoming weaker, and expected to completely split into two separate cells, each spanning thousands of kilometres across, soon.

Dr Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist who "dedicated her life" to discovering the elusive tomb of the legendary Cleopatra, ended up stumbling on a baffling find in her quest, the Daily Express reports.

Having surmised that the final resting place of the last ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom is likely located in an ancient temple site about 30 miles outside of Alexandria, the Taposiris Magna, Martinez made a number of finds in that area that appear to support her theory, such as "200 royal coins depicting the queen’s face and the remains of two high-status Egyptian mummies", the newspaper notes citing the Channel 5 documentary "The Hunt for Cleopatra’s Tomb".

Scientists had been sifting through years of observational data accumulated by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, as they detected an unusual rhythm pattern, or “heartbeat”, in a system about 15,000 light years away from Earth.

Scientists have spotted a mysterious gamma-ray heartbeat emitted by a seemingly inconspicuous cosmic gas cloud.

Further studies by the team, led by DESY Humboldt Fellow Jian Li and ICREA Professor Diego F. Torres from Spain’s Institute of Space Sciences (IEEC-CSIC) showed that cloud in the constellation Aquila was pulsing in sync with the rhythm of a neighboring black hole, hinting to a connection between the two objects.

The team, which also involved scientists from DESY (Germany), ICE (Spain), Nanjing University (China), the US Naval Research Laboratory (USA) and Purple Mountain observatory (China) published their report “Gamma-ray heartbeat powered by the microquasar SS 433” on17 August in the journal Nature Astronomy.

California health officials have reported that a resident of South Lake Tahoe has tested positive for plague, marking the first such case in the state in half a decade. The individual is recovering at home.

It’s believed that the person was infected by a flea while walking their dog, El Dorado County’s Health and Human Services Agency said in a statement. The individual is being treated by medical professionals but did not require hospitalization. An investigation into the matter is still ongoing.

The uncommon but potentially lethal bacterial disease is usually transmitted by fleas found on infected squirrels and other rodents in the wild. Plague can be treated with antibiotics if detected at an early stage.

The state has gone for several years without a confirmed case of plague. The last instance, in 2015, involved two people who contracted the disease at Yosemite National Park. Both individuals made a full recovery.

Simply put, getting vaccinated is going to be our patriotic duty,’ and America should consider making it difficult for the unvaccinated to participate in society, three doctors wrote.

***

A coronavirus vaccine should be mandatory, and tax penalties, higher insurance premiums, and denial of many government and private services ought to be considered for those refusing the shot, two doctors and an attorney argued in USA Today on Thursday.

“[W]hile the measures that will be necessary to defeat the coronavirus will seem draconian, even anti-American to some, we believe that there is no alternative. Simply put, getting vaccinated is going to be our patriotic duty,” wrote Dr. Michael Lederman, Dr. Stuart Youngner, and Maxwell J. Mehlman.

There is no “alternative to vaccine-induced herd immunity in a pandemic,” they argued. “Broad induction of immunity in the population by immunization will be necessary to end this pandemic.”