South Carolina is looking for medical and non medical(administrative) volunteers to help with the covid vaccination program. Here’s the link,https://scdhec.gov/covid19/covid-19-vaccine/covid-19-vaccination-volunteers. 

Your Program co-chairs reached out to Fair Fight, Stacey Abrams's organization in Georgia, about providing a speaker for one of our programs.  Unsurprisingly, they are quite busy and declined our invitation.  They did provide a link to their playbook, which I'm sharing here.  I think many of you will find it of great interest.

https://fairfight.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/TheAbramsPlaybook.pdf

Despite vociferous opposition from doctors, lawyers, religious leaders, advocates, and everyday people, the Senate Medical Affairs Committee gave the bill a favorable report yesterday (9-8), and we expect it to move to the Senate floor for debate next Tuesday. We are potentially within days of the bill becoming law. This radical and dangerous ban will put women’s lives, health, rights, and futures on the line – we need your support to speak out immediately.

Here's how you can help:

Contact your Senators, even if you think they are already on our side. They need to hear from constituents immediately. Email, text, or phone all work. You can use the link below to contact them,  and even better if you personalize the email and let them know you are their constituent and why you are opposed. https://p2a.co/upgyo6e.

For more information:    https://www.scwren.org/blog/ceo-ann-warners-statement-in-opposition-to-s-1-senate-medical-affairs-subcommittee/

Submitted by:  Erin Hall

We have been communicating with Vaccine Advisory Committee asking that they include age 65 and above in the next phase (1b) of the roll out. Currently, only essential workers will be in that category, pushing the older, more vulnerable group, to a much later vaccination. Our concern being that the highest hospitalization and mortality rate rests with the elderly. Our pressing concern is the high contagion rate of the new variant while will cause much greater risk to this group and overwhelm our hospitals who won't have the beds or staffing to meet their needs. Our latest response from the director of the Vaccine Advisory Committee suggests they will continue to review input from the community later this week. 

Our latest letter to Dr. Jane Kelly and Senator Tom Davis is below. 

LLL members willing to email their support for including the over 65 group, can send emails to VAX and Senator Davis at the following email addresses:

Vaccine Advisory Committee:  ACC-VAC@dhec.sc.gov  

Senator : tom@senatortomdavis.com   (who has been advocating for these changes)

Thank you for anything you can do to help with this effort!

Mary Faas

Dr. Kelly / Vaccine Advisory Committee:

We appreciated your response to our input regarding the rationale for decision making re/ Phase 1b. We have read your Jan.15th DHEC recommendations for that phase. We respectfully continue to disagree with your reasoning.
Your primary goal, as stated, for 1b is preventing deaths and the best distribution of a limited vaccine. While essential workers may well be at a substantially higher risk of exposure to COVID, based on occupation,
they are not at a substantially higher risk of hospitalization and death. We believe that is is more important to place age groups of 65 and above in a higher tier, because they are the group that will most likely suffer severe
consequences with hospitalization and death. 

With the newer variants expected to markedly, and detrimentally, affect the US in March, we need to pay special attention to protecting the MOST vulnerable populations who would overwhelm our hospitals. Again, that is 
by virtue of age, not occupation.  Furthermore, the impact on our hospital beds in our community cannot be overstated; patients with heart attacks, car accidents, cancer and other illnesses will be disproportionately affected
with inadequate capacity to address their needs. We are all familiar with the horrific scenes in the California hospitals.

We understand that people living and working  in congregate settings (prisons,shelters,group homes) will likely have greater exposure, but we encourage you to review the data on mortality rates in those populations vs. mortality rates
with our elderly.

One other issue worthy of note…supply and administration in SC. We continue to have a very low administration rate of vaccine. There are obviously many infrastructure problems and likely staffing issues. We need some innovative
thinking on how to best get these shots in arms. Why are we not recruiting retired health care professionals as they are doing in FL and GA? Why are we not using Senior Centers, schools, churches, stadiums to increase access?
The current system with a call number and  links to appointments have not been working well enough for many of the elderly in our community, who have not been able to schedule appointments.

We really need to adapt our thinking as to who gets the vaccine next, and how.

Thank you for this consideration.

Mary Faas APRN
Arthur A Gorman, MD

The Hilton Head MLK Committee for Justice, in partnership with numerous community luminaries and activists, is pleased to present an online program in honor of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This program will be presented on January 14 – 19, 2021 and will consist of online sessions, celebrations, religious ceremonies and musical performances – along with a driving parade on MLK Day.

See the attached program for more detail. 

Greetings. We are Toni Valenstein of Sun City and Arthur Segal of Hilton Head Plantation. Individually we are active members of Liberal Men of the Low Country, Liberal Ladies of the Low Country, the Democratic Party, and one of us was a founding member of both Rabbis4Obama.com and Rabbis4Biden.com.

In Mid-June of 2020 we started a Facebook group to lobby the mayors and councils of HHI and Bluffton into passing their first COVID-19 prevention laws. The laws went into effect just as the July 4^th tourist season was to begin. The laws did have sunset dates at the end of August.

The vote to continue the COVID-19 prevention laws for HHI, Bluffton, and the County is coming up on or around December 5^th.  We need as many people to join our FB group as soon as possible. Our page counts as a petition. The Chair of the County Council, Mr. Passiment,  in an editorial in Hilton Head Monthly’s on line edition said in effect, they are not taking the advice of science or the CDC but will let the public decide whether to wear masks on not in Beaufort County. And maybe if they see deaths rising, they will pass another mask law. 

https://www.hiltonheadmonthly.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6722:opinion-joseph-f-passiment-jr&catid=80&Itemid=245

The FB page address is https://www.facebook.com/groups/933445013749224/. Just click ‘join’.

Thank you so much for being on the right side of history. Blessings,

 Toni, and Arthur

Tuesday: Knock on Doors to Flip the Senate

If John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are going to win their runoff elections, we need your help in order to get the biggest voter turnout in state history.

Tomorrow, the GA Coordinated Campaign will be in Savannah knocking on doors to make sure Democrats are voting in this critical runoff. Can you join us?

What: Canvass with the GA Coordinated Campaign

When: Tuesday, Nov. 24 at 2:00 PM

Where: Savannah (address provided with RSVP)

Safely talking with voters in person is crucial to winning this election -- the more voters who know how Jon Ossoff and Rev. Warnock will help them in the Senate, and that Early Voting starts in just three weeks, the more folks we can get to the polls!

If you've never canvassed before, this is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a historic coordinated campaign. There will be a socially-distanced training on how to canvass safely at the start of the shift.

So grab your friends, put your mask on, and join us for this exciting and incredibly important volunteer opportunity to win this race. Let us know you'll be there tomorrow by RSVPing today

Click here to RSVP

 The Liberal Men of the Lowcountry are inviting the Liberal Ladies of the Lowcountry to join them on  December 9, at 12 noon for a special presentation by The Innocence Project. 

The Innocence Project was started by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufield in 1992 as a nonprofit organization committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted.  The Project also is working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. Various studies estimate that in the United States, between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners are innocent.  Their work has resulted in hundreds of successful exonerations. To learn more about the Innocence Project, see https://innocenceproject.org.

Huwe Burton, the guest speaker (via Zoom) is one of their exonerees. He was wrongfully convicted of murdering his mother in 1991, and spent almost 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit based on a coerced confession (see  https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=5485).

To learn more about the Innocence Project, visit their website (https://innocenceproject.org), or check out the bestselling book Just Mercy (or the movie of the same name with Jamie Foxx). Since Huwe will receive an honorarium, we are asking for a $5 registration fee of our members as well as non-members to help cover expenses

To register for the meeting:

1. Go to the LML website (liberalmenhhi.org)
2. Click on "public calendar" in the top banner
3. Go to December 9 LML Meeting
4. Follow the instructions to enter your information and register for the meeting

The Zoom link for the meeting will be sent out around December 1.  Thanks for sending this out to LLL members.

We know you may be burned out on politics after the Presidential election, but Georgia Democratic runoff candidates could use your help.

Any member who is interested in helping with the runoff elections in Georgia, please visit the following websites for information on virtual phone banking.   

Ossoff:  https://www.mobilize.us/electjon/event/362688/

Warnock:https://www.mobilize.us/warnockforgeorgia/ 

 

This post is a follow-up to the November 2nd email, which allowed you to learn about the nationwide coalition of groups on the alert to mobilize to Protect the Results of the 2020 election. This mobilization is parallel to hurricane season when we are asked to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. 

Liberal Ladies supports Lowcountry Indivisible, Beaufort Indivisible, and Sun City Indivisible as they unite to identify and recruit individuals willing to mobilize as necessary immediately. In the coming weeks. Volunteers should understand this will be a sustained effort until all the votes are counted, and a President is elected.

Mobilizing might mean a rally, car parade, or a peaceful public gathering with signs at a strategic location.  Some tasks (e.g., phone calls) might be able to be completed from home. Alerts will be made as necessary in response to events and may arrive with little advance notice.

If you want to be apart of this initiative and are NOT on a distribution list for Indivisible or other participating groups, please reply to liberalladiescommunications@gmail.com, and the alerts will be forwarded your request.