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While stressing it did not see a link to the vaccination, the Health Ministry said Monday it was investigating the death of a 75-year-old man with serious health problems who died at home hours after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.

The man received the injection of the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine at 8:30 a.m. Monday morning in his northern hometown of Beit She'an. After waiting an obligatory half an hour at the medical clinic, he was released home, saying he felt fine. Some time after getting home, he lost consciousness and was later pronounced dead as a result of heart failure.

The Health Ministry said a preliminary investigation indicated the death did not appear to be connected to the shot. The man suffered from heart disease and cancer, and had suffered a number of previous heart attacks, the ministry said.

The man's family also asked not to link his death to the vaccine, Hebrew media reported.

Ministry director general Chezy Levy nonetheless announced the formation of a committee of inquiry to investigate the incident.

In a separate incident Monday evening, a man was taken to the Terem emergency medical clinic in Jerusalem after suffering a severe allergic reaction around an hour after receiving a dose of the virus.

The man, 46, does not suffer from preexisting conditions but has an allergy to penicillin, Terem said in a statement. The clinic said he has suffered anaphylactic shock as a result of his allergy but that he was given medication and his condition had "stabilized."

The Pfizer vaccine is not made with the coronavirus itself, meaning that there is no chance anyone could catch it from the shots. Instead, the vaccine contains a piece of genetic code that trains the immune system to recognize the spiked protein on the surface of the virus.

No major safety issues were uncovered in trials of the shot and only common vaccine-related side effects like fever, fatigue and injection site pain were found.

A small among of people, however, did suffer severe allergic reactions in the trials. Last week the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they had seen six cases of severe allergic reaction out of more than a quarter-million shots of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine given, including in one person with a history of vaccination reactions.

Israel's Health Ministry on Monday announced a new daily record in coronavirus vaccination numbers, with 98,916 shots administered the previous day, a week after Israel began its inoculation campaign. The total number of inoculations in the country stood at 379,000.

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The youngsters' two-wheeled terror spree on Tuesday began in Midtown, where they swarmed the taxi on Fifth Avenue near East 29th Street, trying to damage the vehicle around 4 p.m., police sources said Thursday.

When the cabbie got out to check the damage, one of the teens threw a bike at his back.

An activist group in the city announced that they intended to demonstrate on Thursday night "in solidarity" with the Black Lives Matter movement, but it appears that things quickly got out of hand.

After assembling in downtown Portland around 9pm, the protesters marched through the streets, stopping to break the window of a Starbucks coffee shop. They also vandalized several other buildings, including a police station, local media reported.

The mob then turned its attention to the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, previously the target of weeks-long nightly protests which often descended into violence. Videos posted to social media show fireworks being launched near the federal building.

The unrest comes just a day after dozens of protesters vandalized nearly a dozen businesses and public buildings, including Portland City Hall, the Oregon Historical Society, and the PPB headquarters.

Earlier this year, Portland became a near-warzone between protesters and federal officers tasked with protecting the federal courthouse. The nightly street skirmishes, sparked by BLM demonstrations held in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police in May, made national headlines and even caught the attention of President Donald Trump, who accused Portland authorities of abandoning their city to "anarchists."

Fireworks set off in downtown Portland, Ore., on Thursday night had little to do with New Year's Eve celebrations - and more to do with continuing the unrest that has plagued the city for nearly a year, according to reports.

A string of messages included a warning to those congregating in the streets.

"If you do not leave you are subject to arrest, citation, and/or the use of force," the police wrote, "including but not limited to impact weapons and tear gas."

Rioters also smashed windows and set fires in the area, Portland's KOIN-TV reported.

Police began using pepper spray or mace against the crowd, as well as what appeared to be rubber bullets or pepper balls, KOIN reported.

Some videos shown on social media showed police officers advancing against the crowd.

I'd like your permission of you and your fine audience that as I answer you that I have your permission to piss you off... The very minute that order went through and that order was followed, and all the legal notices were done, it didn't even take four hours later where moving trucks with this stuff was backed up to those buildings trying to get rid of the evidence.

The GOP's apparent blind spot for problems involving ES&S is curious. Before the GOP began screaming "Dominion, Dominion, Dominion," most of the negative press about the elections industry in the U.S. had for years focused on ES&S. And for good reason.

[...]

Beginning in 2015, ES&S began quietly installing cellular modems in precinct ballot scanners in some counties in swing states such as Florida and Michigan. At some point, it added them in some counties in Wisconsin, Illinois, and beyond. As reported by Kim Zetter earlier this year, these modems connect both the scanners and the receiving end systems to the internet, but officials claimed otherwise. ES&S systems containing modems were never certified by the Election Assistance Commission, but ES&S falsely implied to its customers that they were, as further reported by Zetter this year.

It was on ES&S's watch that 127,000 votes vanished from Diebold machines in predominantly African American precincts in Georgia during the 2018 midterm elections, as reported in the Root. (By then, the Department of Justice had forced ES&S to dissolve Diebold, its subsidiary, on anti-trust grounds, but ES&S had kept most of its contracts.)

Since 2013, ES&S has donated $30,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee whose mission is to elect Republicans to state office. It may also have donated to the Democratic corollary of RSLC, but I've been unable to confirm this. A few years ago, ES&S donated to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), who then killed proposed election-security legislation.

ES&S has also provided secret donations and other gifts to state and county election officials who, in the past few years, have then chosen ES&S's insecure new touchscreen systems for use by most in-person voters.

By choosing these new ES&S touchscreen systems, which are called ballot marking devices, officials ignored the advice of election-security experts who recommended hand marked paper ballots instead. In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where an ES&S representative had assured election officials that "miscalibration" would not be an issue with its new touchscreens ("Scouts honor," he said), dozens of the county's new ES&S touchscreens were miscalibrated during an election in 2019. Similar problems occurred in neighboring Philadelphia, whose decision makers (which included a Democrat and a Republican) had each received donations from ES&S lobbyists before choosing the system. I compiled much of the national news regarding ES&S corruption and its new touchscreen voting machines here.

This article by Greg Gordon at McClatchy exposed ES&S's corrupt advisory board for county and state officials — including officials in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and New York — which recently disbanded due to the media fallout from Gordon's piece. One former board member was South Carolina's election director Marci Andino. In 2018, South Carolina reported that "Andino had accepted nearly $20,000 in expenses during her decade as an adviser for ... [ES&S]." The state went on to buy new ES&S systems for use throughout the state.

In 2017, a cybersecurity firm called Upguard discovered that ES&S had leaked 1.8 million Chicago voter records. ES&S, which acknowledged and corrected the leak, said the data "contained names, addresses, birthdates, partial social security numbers and some driver's license and state ID numbers stored in backup files on a server."

In 2018, as reported by Zetter, ES&S finally admitted, despite prior denials that it had installed remote access software in election management systems (which include county tabulators that compile precinct totals) sold between 2000 and 2006. ES&S later told NPR that it had 300 remote-access customers. It refused, however, to identify those customers. It claims the software has been removed but won't say when it was removed.

[...]

This Verified Voting map from a few years ago shows in orange all states that use ES&S election equipment in at least some counties — either precinct machines or central count scanners. (Georgia has since switched to Dominion, perhaps due to the vanishing black votes scandal with ES&S/Diebold in 2018.) As you can see, ES&S's influence over U.S. elections is staggering. (I would provide an updated map but the last time I checked, Verified Voting's tool no longer included this function. I believe the only major change is Georgia's switch to Dominion from ES&S. I'm told that California may no longer use ES&S at all — up until a few years ago, they still used ES&S for vote by mail in some places.)

Which raises the question again. Why are Republicans ignoring ES&S? Texas's corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton, recently went so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to overturn other states' elections.Meanwhile, he has ignored that ES&S voting systems in his own state had a security "bug" as of September 2020 that could in theory have allowed the installation of unauthorized software.

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