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In early April, YouTube took down a video featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a group of controversial scientists at a March 18 coronavirus roundtable. The online video platform, owned by Google, cited as its rationale that the video contained false statements about the efficacy of children’s mask-wearing.

This story also ran on PolitiFact. It can be republished for free.

The decision has drawn public blowback on social media and from DeSantis himself.

DeSantis held another public roundtable on April 12 (which is currently available on YouTube), along with three of the same scientists who participated in the March 18 session, during which he blasted YouTube for taking down the earlier video, calling the action “censorship.”

He said Google and YouTube have not acted as “repositories of truth and scientific inquiry” throughout the covid pandemic but instead as “enforcers of a narrative.”

“What we’re witnessing is Orwellian,” DeSantis said. … Read the rest

University of Virginia Health System, which for years has sued thousands of patients annually for unpaid bills, said Monday it will cancel a massive backlog of court judgments and liens resulting from those lawsuits dating to the 1990s.

This story also ran on The Washington Post. It can be republished for free.

Combined with reforms UVA announced in 2019, the move is likely to benefit tens of thousands of families and make UVA Health’s collections policies much more generous than those of many hospital systems, said scholars who study health care finance. The decision to wipe out liens that can drain home equity years after a hospital visit is extremely rare, they said.

UVA had been suing patients for decades, many with unpaid bills in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, KHN reported in 2019. Once the health system won cases in court, it could seize wages … Read the rest

The airport says a lot about Cortez, Colorado: The single-engine planes that fly into its one-room airport seat nine passengers at most. The city of about 9,000 is known largely as a gateway to beautiful places like Mesa Verde National Park and the Four Corners Monument. But covid vaccines have made Cortez a destination in its own right.

“We had a couple fly in to get their vaccine from Denver that couldn’t get it in the Denver metro area,” said Marc Meyer, director of pharmacy services and infection control for Southwest Health System, which includes clinics and a community hospital in Cortez. Others have come from neighboring states and as far away as California, Florida and the Carolinas. “They all come back for their second dose,” he said. “Because it’s so hard to get in the cities.”

With vaccines now becoming available to the general public in much of … Read the rest