Tag: pandemic

Minnesota Lays Out Path to Vaccinate All Minnesotans

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As more vaccine arrives in Minnesota, the state is laying out a path to vaccinate all Minnesotans.

Governor Tim Walz announced today that Minnesota will vaccinate at least 70% of Minnesotans age 65 years and older before expanding eligibility to other groups, and aims to reach this goal by the end of March.

Once 70% of the state’s seniors have received the vaccine, Minnesota will expand eligibility based on underlying health conditions and workplace exposure risk. Minnesota will move forward with phases of vaccine eligibility based on science, medical evidence, and federal guidance:

Continue reading “Minnesota Lays Out Path to Vaccinate All Minnesotans”

State Lawmakers Defy Governors in a Covid-Era Battle for Power

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Legislators across the country, mostly Republicans, are moving to strip the powers of governors, many of them Democrats, who have taken on extraordinary authority to fight the pandemic.

Partisan warfare over pandemic lockdowns and mask-wearing is on the wane in Washington: A bitter presidential election has been decided, coronavirus cases are plummeting nationally and vaccines are rolling out slowly but steadily.

Yet in state capitols, the politicized fights are boiling over.

State lawmakers across the country, most of them Republicans, are moving aggressively to strip the powers of governors, often Democrats, who have taken on extraordinary authority to limit the spread of the virus for nearly a year. Continue reading.

GOP not worried about voting against popular relief bill

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Republicans are dismissing the idea that they’ll be punished at the ballot box for voting against President Biden‘s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

The relief measure is expected to get few, if any, GOP votes as it moves through Congress in the coming weeks. Democrats are trying to pressure Republicans into voting for the package, touting polls that show it’s popular with the public.

Republicans counter that much of the bill is focused on Democrats’ longstanding priorities rather than coronavirus relief. And strategists note that it’s unclear whether voters will be thinking about the relief package closer to the midterm elections, which are more than a year and a half away.  Continue reading.

FDA analysis finds Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine is safe and effective

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The Food and Drug Administration’s staff released a briefing document on Wednesday endorsing Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot coronavirus vaccine as safe and effective.

What’s next: An FDA advisory panel will meet Friday to review the briefing document and vote on whether to recommend an emergency use authorization (EUA). The FDA could then issue the (EUA) as soon as this weekend, clearing the way for distribution in the U.S. to begin.

Details: The shot was found to be 66.9% effective against moderate to severe/critical COVID-19 cases 14 days after vaccination, and 66.1% effective after 28 days. Against severe/critical cases, the vaccine was 76.6% effective after 14 days and 85.4% effective after 28 days. Continue reading.

500,000 dead, a number almost too large to grasp

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Here are three ways to visualize the monstrous death toll of the coronavirus in this country

A year ago, covid-19 had killed just a handful of people in the United States. Now, the pandemic’s official death toll equals the size of a major city, more than the population of Kansas City, Mo., and nearly as many as Atlanta or Sacramento.

It can be hard to grasp the enormity — almost half a million people, gone. What if we imagined them traveling as one group? Or killed in action? Or all buried together?

If 500,000 passengers traveled by bus …

An average motor coach — the kind of bus you would take from one city to another — holds 50 people. Transporting only the number of people who died last month would require dozens of buses. Continue reading.

COVID-19 vaccine FAQ: Here’s everything you need to know

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COVID-19 vaccines offer hope for getting out of the pandemic. They also raise a lot of questions. Here are some answers.

Are they safe? What are the side effects?

Both vaccines authorized in the United States, from Pfizer and Moderna, have been found to be safe after intensive reviews by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Experts looked at safety data from about 30,000 people who participated in the clinical trials for each vaccine, and now millions more people have gotten the vaccines. Serious side effects have been extremely rare and have so far consisted of severe allergic reactions in a few people. The rate of severe allergic reactions is about 4.5 per 1 million shots administered, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. And allergic reactions can be treated. Continue reading.

Trump Is Guilty of Pandemicide

History will show the former U.S. president was staggeringly negligent during the pandemic’s deadly third wave.

At long last, we see glimmers of hope. The COVID-19 epidemic in the United States has fallen below the numbers of daily new cases tallied on the eve of the presidential election, the point at which this viral nightmare soared. Using the New York Times’ coronavirus data tracker, on Nov. 1, 2020, there were 74,195 new cases counted in the country; by Feb. 16, new case reports came in at 64,376.

But in between those dates, a national horror unfolded, peaking on Jan. 8 with 300,619 new cases reported in just 24 hours. This staggering wave, one full year into the pandemic, was completely unnecessary for the world’s richest country. Achieving any sense of closure will require holding Donald Trump accountable for the failure.

There is vast evidence of Trump’s negligence during the pandemic’s third wave. Had I been a member of the House of Representatives during the body’s impeachment deliberations, I would have added to Trump’s indictment the crime of pandemicide, naming him as responsible for most of the COVID-19 deaths that transpired while he, the nation’s leader, was preoccupied with damning Joe Biden’s election victory. Trump’s failure to, as he vowed in his oath of office, “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” promulgated a scale of lives lost exceeding anything experienced in the country since the Civil War, 160 years ago. Continue reading.

Fauci unloads on Trump: ‘He did things that were terrible’ when I contradicted him

Dr. Anthony Fauci unloaded on former President Donald Trump in an interview with the UK newspaper The Telegraph.

Throughout the interview, Fauci recounted how his former boss would routinely take bad advice on how to handle the novel coronavirus pandemic and would act out whenever anyone with expertise contradicted him.

“When it became clear that in order to maintain my integrity and to get the right message [across] I had to publicly disagree with him, he did things — or allowed things to happen — that were terrible,” Fauci told the paper. “Like he allowed Peter Navarro [Trump’s trade adviser] to write an editorial in USA Today saying that almost everything I’ve ever said was wrong.” Continue reading.

Over 500,000 dead from coronavirus in U.S.

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More than half a million people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus as of Monday, according to Johns Hopkins data.

Why it matters: The death toll is larger than the total number of U.S. soldiers killed in action in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. It comes just one year after the country’s first coronavirus death was confirmed.

  • “Each death has left an empty space in communities across America: a bar stool where a regular used to sit, one side of a bed unslept in, a home kitchen without its cook,” the New York Times’ Julie Bosman writes.

The scale of the horrifying loss is hard to visualize. 

  • If 500,000 names were listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the height of the structure would be 87 feet tall (instead of 10 feet), the Washington Post figures.
  • 1 person died of the coronavirus every 28 seconds in January, a Post analysis found. Continue reading.

Why grandparents can’t find vaccines: Scarcity of niche biotech ingredients

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Lipid nanoparticles for RNA vaccines were used in small quantities a year ago. Now Pfizer and Moderna can’t get enough.

Acuitas Therapeutics, a tiny biotechnology firm in Vancouver, B.C., has just 30 employees and leases its labs from the University of British Columbia. The company doesn’t even have a sign on its building. Until last year, it outsourced production of only small volumes of lipid nanoparticles, fat droplets used to deliver RNA into cells, for research and a single approved treatment for a rare disease.

But now, one of Acuitas’s discoveries has become a precious commodity. A proprietary molecule called an ionizable cationic lipid is a crucial piece of the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and it is in urgent demand for production of billions of vaccine doses worldwide.

Scaling up production of formerly niche substances such as lipid nanoparticles for a global vaccine drive has been among the most complex challenges facing the Biden administration as it aims to ramp up the frustratingly slow provision of shots across the country, according to interviews with company officials and outside scientists and government reports. Continue reading.