Here are three AZ stories making the news.
Supreme Court Upholds Decision Against Ducey Public Illness Laws
Yesterday the Arizona Supreme Court confirmed the obvious. They took all of two hours to make and write a decision upholding a lower court ruling that public illness measures (mainly anti-mask) conceived by the Governor and tacked on to budget bills this summer are unconstitutional.
I mean, even to a non-lawyer like me this was a no-brainer. The constitution plainly says you can't just throw random shit into a bill that, on the surface, is about budgets.
Apparently the legislature has been doing this kind of thing for a long time. So a side benefit of the ruling is that it will put a stop to the practice for non-pandemic issues as well.
It's yet another legal defeat for Attorney General and would-be next governor Mark Brynovich. If he's not even a good lawyer how can he be a good governor?
Nursing Students Demand Freedom to be COVIDiots
Two nursing students are
suing Maricopa Community College District over a vaccine requirement. They have "religious objections" because the vaccines supposedly depend on fetal cells. That's a BS excuse.
Even the Vatican agrees—here's
an explainer.
According to an
Arizona Republic story (sorry, paywalled) the District doesn't have a mandate but their clinical partners do. Students have to participate in rotations at those places. If the students aren't vaccinated they can't do that, meaning they can't graduate on time. Apparently that's what they're suing about.
I find it infuriating that supposedly educated health care professionals are refusing a vaccine that is a miracle of medical science and has been proven safe and effective billions of times worldwide. Instead of trying to force their way into a profession they apparently don't believe in, those women should find another line of work.
Why So Many Breakthroughs in Arizona?
According to a
story published yesterday, Arizona is having a lot of breakthrough infections. AzDHS has reported almost 50,000 breakthrough cases in vaccinated people, and 376 deaths among those.
The story did not compare that rate to other states, so I don't know if it's unusual. Nonetheless, it seems like a lot, and nobody is sure why it's so high.
One reason is no doubt that there is a lot of COVIDiocy in the state. We have many people running around maskless while we still have a
lot of transmission.
Another theory is that Arizona's mass vaccination program earlier this year relied on the Pfizer vaccine. There are studies showing that It is not as good as Moderna at producing
antibody counts or keeping people
out of the hospital.
