She Says She Was Fired For Saying That Teens Don't Need Parental Consent For Vaccines

A memo sent in the spring started the series of events that ended with Fiscus' ouster
The events leading to her being fired "can only be described as bizarre," Fiscus said.

It all started in the spring, when Fiscus says several health care providers asked her office for clarity about how to handle the then-looming authorization of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for minors as young as 12. As she prepared a memo on the subject, she turned to the Tennessee Department of Health's general counsel, which replied with a doctrine based on a 1987 Tennessee Supreme Court ruling.

The doctrine, which says teens from ages 14-17 don't need to get their parents' or guardians' consent before getting the vaccine, was posted online "and is blessed by the Governor's office on the subject," the legal office said, according to Fiscus. The office reportedly added, "This is forward facing so feel free to distribute to anyone."

But when Fiscus sent a memo sharing that guidance, critics seized on the message and called it a governmental overreach, threatening to disband the state Department of Health, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. At a hearing in Tennessee's legislature, a Republican legislator said the health department's ad campaign encouraging teens to get vaccinated amounted to an attempt "to target children."

By moving into orbit with its Commercial Crew Program and partnering with private companies to reach the lunar surface, NASA hopes to change the economics of spaceflight by increasing competition and driving down costs. If space travel truly does become cheaper and more accessible, it’s possible that private citizens will routinely visit space and gaze upon our blue, watery home world—either from space capsules, space stations, or even space hotels like the inflatable habitats Bigelow Aerospace intends to build.

Private forays into space aren’t anything new. Since 2000, several deep-pocketed tourists have spent tens of millions of dollars to fly to the International Space Station. In addition, NASA has gradually encouraged private companies to take over U.S. launches of cargo and astronauts to the ISS. Commercial cargo flights for NASA began in 2012, and commercial crew flights began in 2020.|
Science on the edge of space.

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Much of the discussion around Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin has focused on the race between Branson and Bezos. But as these dueling billionaires fly toward the heavens, the vehicles their companies have built have enabled new kinds of research.

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Already, the two companies have flown science payloads and tech demonstrations, with the support of NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program. The Unity 22 flight included a human-tended experiment that recorded changes in plants’ gene activity just as the plants started to experience weightlessness, designed by the University of Florida and run by Virgin Galactic employee Sirisha Bandla.

The Economic Impact of Commercial Space Transportation on the U.S. Economy in 2009
EMERGING COMMERCIAL SPACE MARKETS
In the coming years, commercial space transportation may enable new markets that are currently emerging or have yet to develop (pre-emerging). As with the current enabled markets, these new markets may lead to measurable impacts within the U.S. national economy. Because these markets are, or may soon be emerging, they are not included in this report in measuring the economic impact of the space industry. As these market sectors mature and as their revenues increase, they will likely be included in future reports.
Market studies project that public research, educational, and adventure space transportation sectors will become significant revenue-producing markets in the foreseeable future. For example, market studies have shown that “space tourism,” whereby customers pay a fee to experience suborbital spaceflight, could become a billion-dollar market within 20 years.

The rest of the country might finally be catching up to California when it comes to workers’ right to hop between jobs.

The Biden administration asked the Federal Trade Commission to ban or limit noncompete agreements nationwide as part of a broad executive order Friday. These agreements, which typically prevent workers from quitting their jobs and going to work for a competitor of their current employer, are already unenforceable in California. The administration argues that they serve to keep wages down and disempower employees from demanding better working conditions.

This executive order comes as noncompetes are on the rise across the country, with anywhere between 27% and 46% of all private-sector workers subject to the agreements, according to a 2019 survey by the ements, according to a 2019 survey by the Economic Policy Institute. Though broadly intended to discourage employees from taking trade secrets along with them when they switch jobs, noncompete clauses are increasingly worked into jobs across the economic scale.

The sandwich chain Jimmy John’s became a poster child for the practice in 2016, when attorneys general in New York and Illinois sued the company for barring employees from taking another job with competing sandwich shops for two years after quitting and from working for any establishment that made more than 10% of its revenue from sandwiches located within two miles of a Jimmy John’s location.

These conversations take place often in my class. Young people want to understand the world around them, and it’s my job to do my absolute best to help them make sense of things, even if it’s just by providing them with knowledge of past events that created the inequalities they witness on a regular basis. Whether it’s police killing unarmed Black people, anti-Asian violence during the Covid-19 pandemic, or viral videos of people making racist 911 calls, students want to know. I pride myself on helping kids to make connections between these kinds of events and our nation’s history.

This is one reason why I get so frustrated at all the bad takes circulating among politicians, social media, and the news related to critical race theory and the teaching of America’s racial history in K-12 classrooms. The reality is that kids are talking about race, systems of oppression, and our country’s ugly past anyway — from media coverage to last summer’s protests to even this very controversy itself, my students are absorbing these conversations and want to know more. I’m just one teacher, and there’s no way to generalize what’s happening everywhere. But I believe that my students are smart and mature enough to handle the truth.

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Ironically, while few K-12 teachers could define critical race theory before 2021, many will probably teach about it next school year. For me, that will likely look like me planning a class discussion of the controversy during my introductory unit for US history, and deeper analysis in my racial issues and African American history classes. As a teacher, it’s such a gift when news headlines make it so much easier to make history relevant for my 11th graders.