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(The Center Square) – The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on Tuesday voted to ask Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration to prioritize school staff when deciding which groups of workers will get COVID-19 vaccinations next.
Vaccinations began Monday in Louisiana. Based on federal guidelines, tier 1 hospital workers are first in line for the limited supply now available. Long-term care residents and staff and emergency medical drivers are next.
BESE’s request does not include a timeline. Members are asking state officials to make vaccines available to school and early childhood education workers “as soon as possible.”
State Superintendent Cade Brumley said that group includes about 166,000 people and suggested vaccinations would help keep schools and early childhood centers open.
“Birth through 12th-grade employees cut across every region of the state,” he added. “They cut across every demographic in our state. It’s a really good sample population of the state.”
As of last week, about 65 percent of Louisiana’s students were attending classes in person five days a week, Brumley said. About 20 percent were attending class remotely, while 15 percent were attending schools holding a mix of in-person and remote classes, he said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sets the immunization schedules based on recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Prioritizing health care workers and long-term care residents and staff is the first official recommendation, though state leaders have the final say.
Edwards was asked about vaccine prioritization Tuesday during an online meeting of the Monroe Chamber of Commerce. Though state officials expect to receive a total of about 79,000 COVID-19 vaccinations this week and next week, going forward, Edwards said they expect to find out on Friday evenings how many vaccines they will get the following week.
Edwards said state officials will consider the advisory committee’s next set of prioritization recommendations. He has said he expects Louisiana to follow ACIP guidelines for the most part, though some adjustments may be made based on the state’s hospital patient population.
“We’re going to be making decisions and communicating with the public going forward what the different priority groups are going to look like,” Edwards said Tuesday. “We’re asking people to be patient.”

If you read my column on a regular basis, you know the various topics and subjects I address are not about current events, but rather they involve principles or examples that are timeless and we can apply to our lives. Such is the case today, as I want to talk about the senseless violence that is taking place across our nation with regards to members of our law enforcement community.
While there are bad apples in every profession, let me say here in the beginning that I totally support our police and would never want to be without them. We have some people who want society to govern itself, and we will see how that turns out.
No one in their right mind would deny that we have a serious problem in our country. In time we will solve this problem, because that is our nature. Sadly, many people are being hurt and killed while we work through this dilemma, at the same time dealing with a pandemic. When it comes to a great example of a leader who accomplished more than anyone else in dealing with the injustices that have been inflicted on our black brothers, it has to be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who practiced nonviolence as his way of getting things done.
However, I would remind you that his accomplishments were in an era when social and moral values were much different than they are today. Most of his accomplishments took place when he was young, but in his later years he had these radical words to say as he spoke to a packed schoolhouse outside of Detroit, Michigan. “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.”
At this point let me depart from Dr. King -- we all know what a great man he was -- and take a look into the future. We know there are serious injustices in our society and we must collectively take steps to correct them, but at the same time we must take a look at the root problem. A good place to begin is to visualize 1,000 people taking part in a protest. For the sake of example, let’s say 900 of these people are orderly and peaceful, but 100 are not. These are the people who riot, loot and burn buildings. We all see it on our TV screens.
What is the difference between the 900 and the 100? I am going to say that a lot of the difference is education, and that has to do with literacy, something I have been involved in for the past 15 to 20 years. People who have a good education view life, property, and the rights of others differently than those who are school dropouts and are failing in life from a success standpoint. A lot of the problem really comes down to what I discussed in a past column called “Welfare and Unwed Mothers.” If you recall, more than 60 percent of babies born today are born in single-parent homes.
When millions of children grow up without a father, society reaps the consequences.
While this is long-term, that is most of the problem. We must change that situation in order to have a brighter future. The answer is certainly not violence, as this is the worst tool for change. The answer is love.
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(Editor’s Note: Jim Davidson is an author, public speaker, syndicated columnist and Founder of the Bookcase for Every Child project. Since its inception in 1995, Jim’s column has been self-syndicated to over 375 newspapers in 35 states making it one of the most successful in the history of American journalism.)

By Catherine Mortensen

The U.S. media has bombarded Americans with a torrent of unrelenting bad news when it comes to Covid. A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper says the media in this country went too far and created a climate of fear and even panic. In their paper, “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” scholars from Dartmouth College and Brown University analyzed the tone of Covid-related news articles going back to January 1. They found that 91 percent of stories by major U.S. media outlets were negative in tone compared with 54 percent for international media sources. The authors noted that stories of increasing Covid-19 cases outnumbered stories of decreasing cases by a factor of more than 5-to-1, even during times when new cases were declining.
This imbalance in media coverage created a climate of fear.
The Foundation for Economic Education reported:
“Americans and, worse, lawmakers, began to respond to the virus in irrational ways. Basic virology went out the window as ’15 days to flatten the curve’ devolved into a mad idea that we must close down society and shelter from the virus, unleashing unprecedented restrictions on economic freedom and destroying untold numbers of lives and livelihoods in the process. This is the power of fear.”
Curtis Houck, managing editor of the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters, said he is not surprised that 91 percent of the Covid U.S. media coverage was negative in tone because that’s exactly the tone the media has in covering President Trump.
Houck accused the media of “trying to scare the American people and cripple them, breaking people’s wills with lockdowns.”
“The media wants to have its audience in the palm of their hands. They are creating a dependency. ‘Oh, no, don’t go outside!’ They are creating a new dependent class that will tune in every day.”
MRC found that from January to mid-March in an average hour of news, CNN spent 40 second reporting on Covid. He says that’s because CNN was obsessed with impeachment news. Which, as it turned out, was a giant nothing-burger. It was based entirely on fake news.
“The virus is serious, unlike the reporting of it,” noted Houck. He noted that in mid-March the media pivoted sharply into what he described as “hyperbolic” reporting on the virus. “The media was scaring people by reporting on unedited journal studies, and stories like teachers prewriting their obituaries. It was absolute insanity!”
Houck said the media took a holiday in late May and June from their “disingenuous coverage” of Covid to instead focus on the Black Lives Matter street violence. “When the protests broke out, Covid faded to the background, almost as if it didn’t exist anymore.”
As the summer progressed, the media seemed upset with any positive front that the president and the Corona Virus Task Force presented. The media accused President Trump of lying, making idiotic comments at the briefings and eventually called them “a waste of time.”
The media really took aim at Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, one of the first governors to reopen his state. With CNN Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer at the helm, panelists attacked Dr. Deborah Birx for not lashing out at Gov. Kemp for reopening parts of his state’s economy. The clear implication being that Georgia’s Covid deaths would spike as a result of Kemp lifting quarantine restrictions. Today, Georgia’s rate of Covid deaths is half of New York’s and New Jersey’s and well below those of Illinois, Michigan, and the District of Columbia, all of which have much more stringent lockdowns.
Houck said there is no doubt the negative coverage of Covid hurt President Trump in the election. “[MRC] polled five Trump successes, one of them being Operation Warp Speed. We found that more than one out of every three Biden voters had never even heard of it.”
Operation Warp Speed, is, of course, the Trump administration’s successful program to partner with the private sector to bring an effective Covid vaccine to market.
Since the election, he said the media coverage of Covid remains negative and he’s not surprised. “Their real goal is to put Americans in the worst possible shape and it is doing lasting damage, I think mentally, to the American people. The isolation is crippling and when you have nothing to do you might turn on the news or read something in social media and start believing all the negativity hyperbole.”
Houck also notes that the media will continue its drumbeat of negative coverage of the virus through the remainder of this year, trying to build up Biden as our savior, should he be inaugurated in January.
While reporting of the virus must have a serious tone, coverage ought to be balanced. Instead, what we’ve experienced over the past 8 months has been a steady stream of fear and negativity. This one-sided approach has led to irrational choices by the public and worse, policy makers. Ultimately, it has put millions of Americans in such fear and panic, they are willing to give up their freedoms. It is not hyperbole to say that we are now on the verge of losing our liberties, largely as a result of irrational fears created by the media’s warped reporting of reality.

Catherine Mortensen is Vice President of Communications at Americans for Limited Government.

Last week, Gov. John Bel Edwards said nearly 40,000 COVID-19 vaccines may be distributed to healthcare workers in Louisiana within the first week of the FDA approving their use.
On Wednesday, Abbeville General announced it will be getting the vaccine and will be distributing the
vaccine to frontline workers first.
Last week, Edwards was among four governors the Trump administration invited to Washington, D.C., to discuss vaccine distribution plans given the quality of those plans.
The state’s COVID-19 vaccine playbook spells out just who would get the vaccine first when it’s approved.
Healthcare workers at hospitals would be followed by residents at nursing homes.
The three-phase plan aims for everyone else who wants a vaccine getting it by the summer of 2021 if no problems arise.
The FDA could approve the Pfizer vaccine as early as Thursday.
Dr. Joseph Kanter, interim assistant secretary of the state’s Office of Public Health, said things will move quickly whenever that happens.
“From the time the FDA gives that authorization, we could realistically see people being vaccinated here within 24 to 48 hours,” he said.
The vaccine would quickly go to all corners of the state, to hospitals large and small.
“People — really, frontline hospital and healthcare staff — will begin to be vaccinated immediately,” Kanter said.
The first shipments of a COVID-19 vaccine for widespread use in the United States headed Sunday from Michigan to distribution centers across the country, with the first shots expected to be given in the coming week to health care workers and at nursing homes.
Shipments of the Pfizer vaccine will set in motion the biggest vaccination effort in American history at a critical juncture of the pandemic that has killed 1.6 million and sickened 71 million worldwide.
Initially, about 3 million doses were expected to be sent out, and the priority is health care workers and nursing home residents as infections, hospitalizations and deaths soar in the U.S.
With numbers likely to get worse over the holidays, the vaccine is offering a bright spot in the fight against the pandemic that’s killed nearly 300,000 Americans.