President Biden on Wednesday called on all employers to provide workers paid time off to get vaccinated or recover from COVID side effects, and said he’ll include a paid tax credit for small businesses that do so.
Why it matters: The Biden administration sees workplaces as highly influential in making shots more convenient for working adults who are in high-risk industries.
Hi Neighbors,
As a small business owner, I know that the challenges facing our nation’s job-creators have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner (or know one!), new relief options may be available to help you weather this storm. Read on to learn more, and please don’t hesitate to reach out to my office if we can be of assistance during this extraordinarily difficult time:
ECONOMIC INJURY DISASTOR LOAN (EIDL) UPDATE
The Small Business Administration (SBA) began the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program at the start of the pandemic. The SBA announced they have increased the maximum amount small businesses and non-profit organizations can borrow through the program. The SBA has raised the loan limit from 6-months of economic injury with a maximum loan amount of $150,000 to up to 24-months of economic injury with a maximum loan amount of $500,000.
Continue reading “Rep. Dean Phillips (CD3): Small Business Relief Information for You”The CDC and FDA on Friday lifted the recommended pause on use of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine, saying the benefits of the shot outweigh the risk of a rare blood clot disorder.
Why it matters: The move clears the way for states to resume administering the one-shot vaccine.
With the news that all U.S. adults are now eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, the holy grail of infectious disease mitigation – herd immunity – feels tantalizingly close. If enough people take the vaccine, likely at least 70% of the population, disease prevalence will slowly decline and most of us will safely get back to normal. But if not enough people get vaccinated, COVID-19 could stick around indefinitely.
The urgency of reaching that milestone has led some to claim that individuals have a civic duty or moral obligation to get vaccinated.
As a moral philosopher who has written on the nature of obligation in other contexts, I want to explore how the seemingly straightforward ethics of vaccine choice is in fact rather complex. Continue reading.
Rocker and COVID-19 denier Ted Nugent has tested positive for the coronavirus.
The right-wing rock musician revealed in a Facebook video that he is seriously ill with the potentially deadly virus he has insisted is fake or not very serious, reported Consequence of Sound.
“Everybody told me that I should not announce this,” Nugent says in the video. “I have had flu symptoms for the last 10 days. I thought I was dying — just a clusterf*ck.” Continue reading.
The State Department said Monday that it would start updating its travel advisories this week to drastically increase the number of countries that get the “Level 4: Do Not Travel” designation.
In a statement, the department said roughly 80 percent of countries worldwide would soon be marked at the highest warning level. As of Monday afternoon, about 16 percent of countries had that label.
“This alignment better reflects the current, unpredictable, and ever-evolving threat posed by covid-19,” the department said in an email. “We continue to strongly recommend U.S. citizens reconsider all travel abroad, and postpone their trips if possible.” Continue reading.
Bureaucratic infighting put evacuees, officials and U.S. communities at risk of the coronavirus, a report says
A chaotic effort to return hundreds of Americans to the United States in the earliest days of the coronavirus outbreak — including bureaucratic infighting over whether flights out of Wuhan, China, were an “evacuation” or “repatriation” — put the evacuees, federal officials and even U.S. communities at risk, a government watchdog concluded.
The U.S. government-led missions, which included an operation to evacuate Americans from a virus-stricken cruise ship off the coast of Japan in February 2020, were plagued by “serious fundamental coordination challenges,” the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report requested by Congress and released Monday.
The episodes have already been the focus of a whistleblower complaint that sparked a pair of investigations, including a review conducted by lawyers at the Department of Health and Human Services. Those prior reports documented safety lapses, including health officials being told to remove protective gear when meeting with the Wuhan evacuees to avoid “bad optics.” Continue reading.
About 31 percent of adults in the United States have now been fully vaccinated. Scientists have estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the total population must acquire resistance to the virus to reach herd immunity. But in hundreds of counties around the country, vaccination rates are low, with some even languishing in the teens.
The disparity in vaccination rates has so far mainly broken down along political lines. The New York Times examined survey and vaccine administration data for nearly every U.S. county and found that both willingness to receive a vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. The phenomenon has left some places with a shortage of supply and others with a glut.
For months, health officials across the United States have been racing to inoculate people as variants of the coronavirus have continued to gain a foothold, carrying mutations that can make infections more contagious and, in some cases, deadlier. Vaccinations have sped up and, in many places, people are still unable to book appointments because of high demand. In Michigan, where cases have spiraled out of control, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, recently urged President Biden to send additional doses. Continue reading.
NOTE: The Washington Post is providing this article free of charge to all to read.
There are various ways to document that you received a coronavirus vaccine. Some people have snapped selfies proudly displaying the Band-Aid on their upper arm. Some vaccination sites are handing out stickers. But the official form of documentation is the small white vaccination record card issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which you receive after your first shot.
“You do want to make sure you keep it safe,” says Kelly Moore, deputy director of the Immunization Action Coalition. “You do want to make a copy of it and keep that on file, not because it’s the only record, but because it’s the one that you control.”
Here’s what Moore and other experts say you need to know about the cards and what you should do after receiving one. Continue reading.
President Biden is facing a series of fresh obstacles in getting the coronavirus pandemic under control in the United States.
Several states have seen an uptick in cases even as millions of Americans are vaccinated each day, which can be attributed in part to the lifting of restrictions on masks and businesses and general pandemic fatigue more than a year after the virus began to spread widely. More contagious variants are spreading throughout the country, and experts warn that new variants could pop up until the country reaches a greater degree of immunity.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended a pause in the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine this week. While many health experts praised it as the right move, an extended pause could drive up vaccine hesitancy, posing yet another challenge for Biden. Continue reading.
