Tag Archive for: Dr. Michelle Au Atlanta Magazine

Georgia bill that loosens gun laws a ‘slap in the face’ after mass shooting, says senator

Democratic Senator Michelle Au says Bill 218 increases the number of guns in circulation in her state

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New Georgia bills proposed following spa shootings would create waiting period for gun purchases

ATLANTA — Three new gun control bills in the Georgia legislature are a direct result of the killings of eight people last week at three spas in metro Atlanta.

The measures would require a five-day waiting period for gun purchases. They will also be next-to-impossible to enact this year. 

About two dozen bills have been floating around the General Assembly this year that would either curb or expand gun rights.  Not a single one of them has gotten a vote in the House or Senate.  

Spa shootings could be first test of Georgia hate crimes law

The murder case against a white man accused of shooting and killing six women of Asian descent and two other people at Atlanta-area massage businesses could become the first big test for Georgia’s new hate crimes law.



Biden addresses deadly Atlanta-area spa shootings

ATLANTA — The murder case against a white man charged with shooting and killing six women of Asian descent and two other people at Atlanta-area massage businesses this week could become the first big test for Georgia’s new hate crimes law.

Robert Aaron Long, 21, told police that the attacks Tuesday at two spas in Atlanta and another massage business near suburban Woodstock were not racially motivated and claimed to have a sex addiction. Authorities said he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation but were still investigating his motive.

Because most of the victims were women of Asian descent, there’s skepticism of that explanation and public clamoring for hate crime charges, especially among the Asian American community, which has faced rising numbers of attacks since the coronavirus pandemic took hold.

But, like many states, the Georgia law enacted last summer does not provide for a standalone hate crime, instead allowing an additional penalty when a person is convicted of another crime.

State Sen. Michelle Au Calls On Georgia To Do More To Protect Asian Americans

While the investigation into Tuesday’s shootings is just beginning, state Sen. Michelle Au said on “Morning Edition” that this event is another in a long history of violence against people of Asian descent in this country. CREDIT GEORGIA GENERAL ASSEMBLY
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Georgia state Sen. Michelle Au has long been concerned about the safety of Asian Americans here in Georgia, so much so she went before her fellow lawmakers to speak about it Monday.

On Tuesday, there were a series of shootings at massage spas in and around Atlanta — eight people were killed and six of the victims were Asian women. The shootings have not been ruled a hate crime, with police citing suspect Robert Aaron Long’s statement that he was motivated instead by a sexual addiction.

Au spoke to “Morning Edition” host Lisa Rayam about how she sees this incident in the broader context of an ongoing spike of discrimination against Asian Americans related to misinformation about the coronavirus.

GA Democrat warned of anti-Asian violence hours before Atlanta shootings

The day before the deadly shootings across the Atlanta area, Democratic State Senator Dr. Michelle Au spoke out in the state capitol about anti-Asian violence. She joined MSNBC’s Brian Williams to discuss that and more.
 

With the clock ticking, Georgia lawmakers want the state to end daylight saving time

Georgia’s Senate passed a bill that could end Daylight Saving Time.

(CNN) Last week, Georgia’s Senate passed a bill 46-7 that would end the state’s observance of daylight saving time.

If enacted, it would mean that Peach State residents would no longer need to prepare for “springing forward” or “falling back” each year. But they would also miss that extra hour of daylight each day between March and October.

The efforts in Georgia follow other states’ attempts to end time changes, but those legislatures have pushed for their states to retain daylight saving time all-year round.

California voted to make daylight saving time permanent in 2018, and Washington did the same in 2019. But federal law would have to change for these measures to take effect.

How chronic underfunding fueled
Georgia’s Covid-19 vaccine woes

Advocates warn federal support doesn’t offer a permanent solution,
nor will it ease chronic understaffing

 

An emergency room nurse in Savannah receives a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020. PHOTOGRAPH BY SEAN RAYFORD/GETTY IMAGES

JANUARY 26, 2021
 

When Amber Schmidtke was a medical school professor in Macon, she started a research project to better understand why so many of the state’s kids were behind on their childhood immunizations. In 2017, Georgia was the slowest state in the nation to get three-year-olds fully vaccinated against infections like measles and whooping cough. Schmidtke found that a major reason for the state’s poor performance was the Georgia Registry of Immunization Transactions and Services—abbreviated, obviously, as GRITS.

Created in 1996, GRITS was initially designed to ensure children statewide were benefiting from federal vaccination programs by tracking immunizations given mostly in pediatricians’ offices and by county health departments. It was built for “more of a trickle than a flood,” says Schmitdke, and was so infrequently used to track adult vaccinations that most internists had no clue how to use it.

Schmidtke wasn’t particularly surprised, then, to hear that during the state’s massive Covid-19 vaccination rollout effort, GRITS had become a particularly gluey cog in the public health machine, its crashes and delays leading to dramatically underreported levels of vaccine administration statewide. But she was stunned when, during a January 19 hearing before the Georgia legislature, health department director Kathleen Toomey requested only minimal additional funding for public health in the 2022 budget.

 

Georgia’s Slow COVID Vaccine Rollout Exposes Broad Public Health Shortfall

Tammi Brown, Chatham County Health Department Nurse Manager, was among the first in Georgia to receive the vaccine against COVID-19 on December 15, 2020 as Memorial University Medical Center emergency room nurse David Wilson awaits another dose and Gov. Brian Kemp and State Sen. Ben Watson look on.

By: Ross Williams

The Georgia Department of Public Health is working to get COVID-19 vaccines in the arms of eligible Georgians, but employees there do not get a break from the work they had before the pandemic.

That’s what Democratic state Sen. Michelle Au, a physician from Johns Creek, found out as she was helping vaccinate people in Norcross for the health department on a recent weekend.

“You see how much else they also have to do, and it was Saturday, so they didn’t have quite the volume for that kind of thing, but they’re handling stuff for WIC, the women and children’s food program, they’re handling other vaccines, all the childhood vaccines are in that same fridge, essentially, trying to be delivered,” she said.

“So there’s all these elements of the public health structure that are supposed to be running under non-pandemic circumstances that they do an admirable job of handling but are still under-resourced, and now we’re piling this huge task on top of it,” Au added.

She’s on the front lines of the pandemic.
And running for office.

Michelle Au could become the first Asian American woman to serve as a state senator in Georgia.

 

A local Georgia race that hasn’t attracted much attention could make history if Michelle Au becomes the first Asian American woman to serve as a senator in the state’s legislature.

On Tuesday, Au, a 41-year old Chinese American anesthesiologist in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, won her district’s Democratic primary against 53-year-old Bangladeshi American health care entrepreneur Josh Uddin.

Technically, the state was still counting ballots on Thursday, but local media, including the Atlanta Journal Constitution, called the race for Au with 77 percent of the votes to Uddin’s 23 percent after a chaotic primary voting day that foreshadows potential problems with November’s general election.

“They’ve called the race and we feel good about where it is,” Au said.