“Top Republicans are calling for a public uprising to protest President Biden’s broad vaccine mandates, eight months after more than 500 people stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to overturn the election,” Axios reports.

“It has been decades since America has witnessed such blatant and sustained calls for mass civil disobedience against the U.S. government.”

“I’m very much in favor of making and encouraging mandates. This was not just superficial stuff. This is going to have a significant impact.”

— Dr. Anthony Fauci, quoted by the Washington Post, on President Biden mandating that employers require vaccination for their workers.

Axios: “This weekend, we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people. But we’ve lost track of the fact that at least that many will die of COVID-19 within the span of two days.”

An AP-NORC poll conducted in August found 55% of Americans in favor of requiring government workers to be fully vaccinated, compared with 21% opposed.

Similar majorities also backed vaccine mandates for health care workers, teachers working at K-12 schools and workers who interact with the public, as at restaurants and stores.

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”

— President Biden, in an address to the nation, speaking directly to the unvaccinated.

On July 4th, President Biden said the country was “closer than ever to declaring our independence” from the coronavirus. That turned out to be false as the highly-contagious Delta variant surged — mostly through the unvaccinated population.

At 5:00 pm ET, Biden will outline his new plan to encourage — and even mandate — vaccinations in an effort to end the pandemic.

Leave your reactions in the comments.

“President Biden is announcing sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will impact tens of millions of Americans, pushing all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workforces to be inoculated or face weekly testing,” the Washington Post reports.

Associated Press: “The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.”

“Biden is also signing an executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government — with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.”

CNN reports companies could face thousands of dollars in fines per employee if they don’t comply.

New York Times: “Just as millions of families around the United States navigate sending their children back to school at an uncertain moment in the pandemic, the number of children admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 has risen to the highest levels reported to date. Nearly 30,000 of them entered hospitals in August.”

Wendy Molyneux: “The fucking vaccine will not make you magnetic. Are you fucking kidding me? It just fucking won’t. That’s not even a fucking thing, and that lady who tried to pretend the vaccine made her fucking magnetic looked like a real fucking fuckwad and a fucking idiot, so get fucking vaccinated.”

“The vaccine also doesn’t have a fucking 5G chip in it. What the fuck do you think a fucking 5G chip is, fucknuts? You think it’s like some invisible nanotechnology they can suspend in a liquid and then just put in your fucking blood and then it what, exactly? Fucking floats around in your body going on Instagram and telling the government you went to the grocery store? No one fucking cares where you go, you absolute fucking fuck-barf.”

“President Biden is expected to sign an order Thursday requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated, without any option for regular coronavirus testing to opt out of the mandate,” the Washington Post reports.

The mandate will impact all 2.1 million federal workers as well as millions of contractors who work with the U.S. government.

Biden is scheduled to speak to the nation at 5 p.m. ET.

“The Delta surge appears to have peaked in Florida and other states that drove the most recent Covid-19 surge, offering some relief after the variant upended what many thought would be a more normal summer,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“But cases and hospitalizations have been rising in many other states including Kentucky and North Carolina, data show, and public-health experts said the return of unvaccinated schoolchildren to classrooms, cold weather in Northern states and the holiday season could yet give the virus new opportunities to spread.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci told Axios that Americans are now getting infected with COVID-19 at 10 times the rate needed to end the pandemic, which will persist until more people get vaccinated.

Said Fauci: “The endgame is to suppress the virus. Right now, we’re still in pandemic mode, because we have 160,000 new infections a day. That’s not even modestly good control… which means it’s a public health threat.”

He added: “In a country of our size, you can’t be hanging around and having 100,000 infections a day. You’ve got to get well below 10,000 before you start feeling comfortable.”

“President Biden is expected on Thursday to detail his administration’s plan to put pressure on private businesses, federal agencies and schools to enact stricter vaccination mandates and testing policies as the Delta variant continues its spread across the United States,” the New York Times reports.

Washington Post: “It’s expected to be a significant speech at a turning point for the United States, where hopes that vaccinations would ease the strain on hospitals and allow more social freedoms were dampened by the spread of the highly contagious variant.”

Politico: How the Delta variant bottlenecked Biden’s presidency.

“For God’s sakes a livin’, how difficult is this to understand?”

— West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R), losing it over the “crazy ideas” from anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists.

“Key backers of the QAnon conspiracy theory are carrying out a coordinated campaign against a Chicago hospital that has refused to prescribe an unapproved drug to treat one of the group’s followers for COVID-19,” the Chicago Sun Times reports.

“The supporters are demanding that doctors give a hospitalized ally ivermectin, a medication approved for treating parasites in both humans and animals that has garnered huge interest in recent weeks, with the vaccine-averse increasingly touting it as a groundbreaking coronavirus treatment.”

Dr. Ashish Jha: “If there were a place where this could have happened, it should have been Sturgis. The best data suggests that at least 75 percent of the entire South Dakota population has some degree of immunity against the virus: About half of South Dakotans have immunity because they’ve been infected by covid-19, and about half of the population has been vaccinated — some of whom have already had covid-19 when they got their shot, so there is some overlap between these two groups. South Dakota, despite its middling vaccination rates, probably has among the highest levels of population immunity in the nation, driven largely by horrifying winter outbreaks.”

“That’s what makes Sturgis an important test. If it had gone off without big spikes in covid cases, it would have provided strong evidence that this level of population immunity — around 75 percent — would allow us to get back to the way we did things in 2019. But unfortunately, that’s not what happened.”

“Health officials are urging people to get their flu shots now, in an attempt to prevent further strain on hospitals already overwhelmed by Covid-19 and other viruses,” NBC News reports.

“The push to get flu shots as soon as possible comes as two studies warn that this flu season could be a miserable one.”