YouTube is scrubbing videos that contain misinformation about vaccines, including content from Chelsea Green Publishing author Joseph Mercola.

The Vermont publishing house and Mercola, an osteopath and prolific disseminator of COVID-19 misinformation, were the subject of a September 27 Seven Days cover story. Coauthor of a best-selling book, Mercola also had half a million followers on his YouTube channel, according to the New York Times.

YouTube announced the decision in a blog post Wednesday, writing that while vaccines have been "a source of fierce debate" for years, the coronavirus era has called for stronger policies. The media company said it had already removed more than 130,000 videos for violating its COVID-19 vaccine policies.
"We’ve steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over into misinformation about vaccines in general, and we're now at a point where it's more important than ever to expand the work we started with COVID-19 to other vaccines," the statement said.

Lawmakers must wait until January if they wish to fix a botched effort to raise unemployment benefits.

They should have slowed down and taken more care last spring when creating the benefits program that was later rejected by the feds, Labor Commissioner Michael Harrington said Tuesday.

"The legislature moved extremely quickly on this," Harrington said at a legislative hearing. "It was all based on theory, and not fact. No due diligence was taken to make sure the law that resulted actually conformed with the federal requirements."

Vermont’s legislative leaders have asked the U.S. Department of Labor to reconsider a decision that blocks a $25 increase for about 4,000 Vermonters who are receiving unemployment insurance. Vermont lawmakers last spring tucked the additional benefit into state legislation related to the unemployment insurance trust fund, the source of benefits for out-of-work Vermonters.

Federal labor officials later ruled that the Vermont Department of Labor didn’t have to follow lawmakers’ intent to award the extra money. On Tuesday, Harrington said the only way to make the money available is to rewrite the law in the coming session.

The state is eyeing a major expansion of testing in K-12 schools as a way to reduce the number of students who must miss class to quarantine because of a possible COVID-19 exposure.

One of the programs, dubbed "test to stay," would provide a new option for unvaccinated students who had close contact with a person with COVID-19. Instead of quarantining for up to 14 days, these students would be offered rapid tests each day before entering school, until seven days after their last known exposure.

A similar program is in use in Massachusetts, Education Secretary Dan French said at the governor's weekly COVID-19 press briefing.

Updated at 5:53 p.m.

Republicans are suing the cities of Winooski and Montpelier in an effort to strike down recent charter changes that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

The suits, brought by the Vermont GOP and the Republican National Committee, contend that the cities' new charters violate the Vermont Constitution, which limits voting to U.S. citizens 18 and over. In the complaints, attorney Brady Toensing wrote that the limit should apply to municipal elections, contending that in modern times, they are not distinct from their state and national counterparts.

"Over the years, the state has become more and more involved in what previously were strictly local matters, erasing distinctions that previously existed between local and state affairs," he wrote.

Both municipalities passed the charter changes by wide margins, and the Vermont legislature approved them earlier this year, too. But Gov. Phil Scott vetoed the measures on the grounds that “highly variable town-by-town approach” to local voting effectively creates “separate and unequal classes of residents.” The state House and Senate overrode Scott's veto in June.

Monday, September 27, 2021