Blazingcatfur

The German state of Hesse has become the first to allow businesses to deny the unvaccinated access even to basic necessities, setting a troubling precedent as its neighbors wrestle with protests against vaccination mandates.

Hessian supermarkets have been granted permission to deny the unvaccinated the right to buy food and other essentials, the state chancellery confirmed to German magazine BILD on Friday. Under the new policy, stores can decide whether to implement the ‘2G rule’, which means allowing entry only to the vaccinated and recovered (‘geimpft’ and ‘genesen’ in German) or the more lax ‘3G rule’, encompassing those who have tested negative for the virus (getestet).

Ah, the Glasgow Times. My second favourite newspaper (the ultimate must remain unnamed). Getting close to the hive gathering known as COP26, the Glasgow Times passed on glad tidings that the 30,000 attending from all over God’s plague-pocked world (the number has jumped from 25,000) “will not need to use the Scottish government’s vaccine passport system to enter the conference.”

Covid-19 ‘vaccine lottery’ schemes across 19 states had no noticeable effect on vaccination rates and may have squandered millions in tax dollars, according to newly published research that suggests the programs were a major flop.

Published in the JAMA medical journal on Friday, the pre-print study by researchers at the University of Colorado Denver showed that the links between vaccine lottery announcements and inoculation rates were “very small in magnitude” and “statistically indistinguishable from zero.”