An American lawyer who has backed religious freedoms, winning big cases at the Supreme Court, says trying to get a religious exemption to vaccine mandates is a losing battle. UVA law professor Douglas Laycock successfully fought for a baker who refused to create a cake for a gay couple and for a business that wouldn’t cover emergency contraceptives for employees. But he says those claiming religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates could easily be denied.
Douglas Laycock, professor at UVA School of Law and an expert on religious liberty law, said companies have ways to verify religious exemptions requests, although the process can be complicated. To prevail against a person attempting to avoid vaccine requirements on religious grounds, the government has to demonstrate a “compelling interest” in the vaccine, Laycock explained. “This is a very easy case for compelling government interest,” he said, noting the higher number of COVID-19 deaths in states with low vaccination rates versus states with high rates.
(Commentary by assistant professor Shiran Victoria Shen, a political scientist and environmental engineer and a Hoover National Fellow) From heat domes in the Pacific Northwest to floods in Henan, China, 2021 has been a year riddled with extreme weather events. Identifying appropriate ways to tackle climate change is more crucial and timelier than ever.
Anthony Poindexter, who has been elected to the 2020 College Football Hall of Fame, will be honored by the University of Virginia and The National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame during Saturday’s game at Scott Stadium between UVA and Duke.
Virginia basketball traveled to Charlotte on Tuesday for the ACC Tipoff media event. The Cavaliers were represented by head coachTony Bennettforward Kadin Shedrick and guard Reece Beekman. Here is everything said during their time at the podium.
All five candidates for the Charlottesville School Board will field questions from the community during a forum Thursday, the only one scheduled so far. The Black Parents Association and CCS Joint PTO are hosting the virtual forum, which will start at 6:30 p.m. Youth Nex, a center at the University of Virginia focused on positive youth development, is supporting the forum as well.
Earlier in October, a survey by the UVA’s nonpartisan Center for Politics pointed to a desire among some for the country to be split into red and blue halves.
(Commentary) A falsehood-fed fire is engulfing American democracy, where more than half of Trump voters – and four out of 10 Biden voters – support secession from the union. Those startling numbers are from an online survey by the UVA Center for Politics in partnership with Project Home Fire, an initiative “dedicated to finding common ground in American politics.”
About 90% of prospective drugs are pulled in clinical trials, and the vast majority of the time that’s because they weren’t effective, as opposed to a commercial reason, a May 2021 paper by the University of Virginia’s Ekaterina Khmelnitskaya found.
An international team of scientists says timely vaccination is very important ahead of the flu season. According to a release, the findings came from a collaboration between the UVA School of Medicine and the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil. The researchers found that poor timing of influenza vaccination campaigns in the semi-arid region of Brazil led to an increase in premature births, lower birth-weight babies, and the need to deliver more babies by cesarean section.
With flu season approaching in the United States, new research from an international team of scientists testifies to the importance of timely vaccination: Poor timing of influenza vaccination campaigns in the semi-arid region of Brazil led to an increase in premature births, lower birth-weight babies and the need to deliver more babies by cesarean section, the researchers found. The findings, from the UVA School of Medicine and longstanding collaborators at the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil, come as the United States rolls out annual flu vaccines amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Podcast) Lana Swartz, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, discusses cryptotwitter and her book “New Money: How Payments Became Social Media.”
UVA experts believe the worse of the pandemic’s fourth wave — blamed on the highly transmissible delta variant — has passed, but cases remain elevated.
UVA Medical Center researchers identified the Mu variant in the genomic surveillance that they track, said Bryan Lewis, a research associate professor at UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute, who developed the COVID-19 projection model for Virginia. “We’ve seen some evidence that Mu is having trouble out-competing Delta,” said Lewis.
(Audio) For many, Elizabeth Holmes was the embodiment of the girlboss brand of feminism. Her relentless ambition, status as the youngest female self-made billionaire and as a female CEO in the male-dominated Silicon Valley made Holmes a role model for many women in tech. Now years later, her trial defense portrays a drastic contrast to the image of the empowered, all-knowing CEO. Has feminism played a role in shielding Holmes from criticism and accountability? Anne Coughlin, a UVA professor of law, helps parse this out.
(Subscription required) What UVA basketball is under Tony Bennett, what it was built upon throughout the previous 12 seasons: continuity, collectivity, mutual long-term growth. Virginia players tend to come to campus as (relatively and variably) unheralded but promising talents; they often leave only after four seasons (and maybe a redshirt year thrown in), ready to embark on successful professional hoops careers. They progress through the program in studied increments. There’s just one problem: Are we sure men’s college basketball still works like this?
While experts agree that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have proven to be extremely effective, scientists around the world are trying to build a better vaccine. Some say a more universal vaccine targeting multiple families of coronavirus could prevent another outbreak. Researchers at UVA, the University of California-Irvine and UNC Chapel Hill are already testing or studying universal protection. It’s a quest to develop one shot to rule them all.
Kevin Pritchard made his offseason desire clear: The Indiana Pacers president of basketball operations wanted someone to emerge as a locker room leader and he wasn’t sure whether that player was on the roster at the end of last season. By the time training camp opened, Pritchard thought he had found an answer in [UVA alumnus] Malcolm Brogdon.
Chris Cornelius looks at the contemporary art sculpture that has become the centerpiece of the plaza outside Lawrence University’s Mudd Library, its shape pointing purposely northwest toward what is now the home of the Menominee Nation, and wonders what conversations it might spark. “I would hope the Indigenous community here on campus would see it as a place to gather, to have as a physical symbol that they are being acknowledged, and to open those conversations up about how land was acquired and who was Indigenous to it and how do we begin to reconcile that with one another,” said Cornelius,...
“You can’t take the politics out of politics,” says University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato. “I don’t blame the commissioners really because they’re simply defending the interest of the party that appointed them or elected them.”