Tag: pandemic

New Plan for Vaccines and Restaurants


Hi Neighbors,

From meeting with constituents to advocating for Minnesota small businesses to supporting accelerated COVID-19 vaccine distribution, it’s another busy week in Washington. Here’s what I’ve been up to: 

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I had a great meeting with Climate Generation about the importance 
of combatting climate change in the 117th Congress

Saving Our Restaurants

Minnesota chefs got some love during the Super Bowl, but the COVID-19 pandemic is putting the survival of America’s 500,000 independent restaurants and their 11 million employees in jeopardy. As a new member of the House Small Business Committee, I helped lead my colleagues in calling for immediate support for restaurants, which are uniquely impacted by the pandemic. Restaurants are the heart of our communities, and a targeted grant program should be a top priority in our relief negotiations.

Continue reading “New Plan for Vaccines and Restaurants”

Masks should fit better or be doubled up to protect against coronavirus variants, CDC says

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NOTE: The following article is provided for all to read free of charge by The Washington Post.

Making the seals tighter to prevent air leakage can reduce people’s exposure by more than 95 percent in laboratory tests.

Federal health officials Wednesday urged Americans to consider wearing two masks as one of several strategies to better protect themselves against the threat of more contagious variants of the coronavirus.

Two methods substantially boost fit and protection, according to a CDC reportand updated guidance on its website. One is wearing a cloth mask over a disposable surgical mask. The second is improving the fit of a single surgical mask by knotting the ear loops and tucking in the sides close to the face to prevent air from leaking out around the edges and to form a closer fit.

Both of those methods reduced exposure to potentially infectious aerosols by more than 95 percent in a laboratory experiment using dummies, the report said.

Opinion: The K-shaped recovery requires help for lower wage workers

Click through national news stories these days and you could be easily confused about how our economy is doing. Click one story and you can read that the stock market is soaring — a “record-breaking” year, some call it. Click another and read that one in six Americans struggle to get enough to eat.

Readers are likely to find themselves reflected in one or the other of those recent stories, not both.

While no income group or community has been untouched by COVID-19, the economic recession it has triggered may be the most unequal in modern history. Underlying economic and racial disparities have been heightened. Continue reading.

Report reveals how Trump’s team conspired to protect his interests as COVID-19 ransacked the US

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Former President Donald Trump’s administration is under fire for hindering the government’s pandemic response and rolling back Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) coronavirus mitigation guidelines in an effort to protect his interests. 

According to CNBC News, the latest reports stem from documentation compiled during the House Oversight investigation launched back in September 2020. Based on the documents, the Trump administration is said to have intentionally suppressed COVID-19 testing by rolling back the CDC guidelines.

To justify the scaling back of COVID testing, former Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) scientific advisor Paul Alexander argued there was little significance in testing asymptomatic individuals, according to emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. Continue reading.

Newly Released Emails Show Trump Appointees Tried To Slow Virus Testing

Newly released emails written by a former Trump administration official show just how deep the effort to slow down the testing of Americans for the coronavirus went, as political appointees sought to meet Donald Trump’s demand to make the number of cases look smaller in an effort to bolster his reelection chances.

The emails were released by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which has been investigating Trump’s failed pandemic response. The Washington Post first reported on the emails, which the committee says prove there was political interference in the Trump administration’s virus response efforts.

The emails were sent by Paul Alexander, a Trump political appointee who was behind an effort to get the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop testing asymptomatic people who had been exposed to the coronavirus. Alexander was the same official who Politico reported in December was behind the push for a “herd immunity” strategy, in which Alexander wanted millions of people to be infected with the coronavirus to build community resistance to it and end the pandemic — a strategy public health officials said was dangerous and could have led to many more deaths. Continue reading.

New variants threaten to reverse progress against COVID-19

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The rise of more contagious variants of the coronavirus are threatening an encouraging trend of falling COVID-19 cases across the country.

New U.S. cases of COVID-19 on Sunday dropped below 100,000 for the first time since November, a hopeful sign after a brutal post-Thanksgiving period that saw cases, hospitalizations and deaths spike.

Health officials are urging the public and governors not to ease up on precautions despite the somewhat improved situation, given that measures like wearing a mask and distancing from others are even more important when the virus is more contagious.  Continue reading.

Facebook says it will crack down on COVID vaccine misinformation

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Facebook says it will take tougher action during the pandemic against claims that vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccination, are not effective or safe.

Why it matters: It’s a partial reversal from Facebook’s previous position on vaccine misinformation. In September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wouldn’t target anti-vaccination posts the same way it has aggressively cracked down on COVID misinformation.

Details: Facebook is doing four things to crack down on misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccinations in general, following consultation with the World Health Organization: Continue reading.

Majority of Americans approve of Biden’s coronavirus response, poll finds

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Two in 3 Americans approve of President Biden’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a poll by ABC News-Ipsos, with widespread support for his efforts to pass a relief bill.

The survey was conducted Feb. 5 and 6 among 508 adults using the probability-based KnowledgePanel. Biden’s 67 percent approval on handling the coronavirus contrasts sharply with how Americans felt President Donald Trump handled the pandemic. In October, 61 percent said they disapproved of Trump’s response to the coronavirus.

Biden earned high marks among Democrats and political independents in the new poll, with 96 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of independents approving. Just a third of Republicans, 33 percent, voiced approval. Continue reading.

U.K. coronavirus variant spreading rapidly through United States, study finds

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The coronavirus variant that shut down much of the United Kingdom is spreading rapidly across the United States, outcompeting other strains and doubling its prevalence among confirmed infections every week and a half, according to new research made public Sunday.

The report, posted on the preprint server MedRxiv and not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, comes from a collaboration of many scientists and provides the first hard data to support a forecastissued last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed the variant becoming dominant in the United States by late March.

The spread of the variant, officially known as B.1.1.7, and the threat of other mutant strains of the virus, have added urgency to the effort to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible. The variant is more contagious than earlier forms of the coronavirus and may also be more lethal, although that is far less certain. Continue reading.

House panel renews probe into Trump administration’s interference with covid-19 response

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Top Democrat makes new allegations of political appointees muzzling scientists.

NOTE: This article is provided to read to all free of charge by The Washington Post.

The head of a House oversight panel on Monday renewed its investigation into political interference in the nation’s coronavirusresponse, releasing new allegations of meddling in scientists’ work.

Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), chairman of the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, released emails from a Trump science adviser that he said showed how the administration worked to weaken guidance on who should be tested for the coronavirus. Clyburn also cited evidence that Trump appointees sought to boost access to unproven treatments for the coronavirus that were favored by the president.

The panel “is continuing these critical investigations … in order to understand what went wrong over the last year and determine what corrective steps are necessary to control the virus and save American lives,” Clyburn wrote to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and acting health and human services secretary Norris Cochran, in letters shared with The Washington Post.