Trump supporter and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced on Wednesday that he will be starring in a new, nationwide ad urging Americans to learn from his experience of surviving COVID-19.
"This message isn't for everyone, it's for all those people who refuse to wear a mask," Christie says into the camera.
"You know, lying in isolation in the ICU for seven days, I thought about how wrong I was to remove my mask at the White House," he explained.
"Today, I think about how wrong it is to let mask wearing divide us," he said, without acknowledging his friend in the Oval Office was the leading voice politicizing mask wearing.
"Especially, as we now know, you're twice as likely to get COVID-19 if you don't wear a mask. Because if you don't do the right thing, we could all end up on the wrong side of history," he said. "Please, wear a mask."
Americans were greeted with rare good news about the coronavirus vaccines on Wednesday.
"Pharmacists have found a way to squeeze extra doses out of vials of Pfizer's vaccine, potentially expanding the nation's scarce supply by up to 40 percent," Politico reported. "The Pfizer vials are supposed to hold five doses, but pharmacists have found they have enough for a sixth or even a seventh dose. Putting those into use could significantly increase the United States' scarce early supply of the shot, reducing the likelihood of a 'vaccine cliff' this spring as demand outpaces supply."
America has ordered 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which is enough to vaccinate 50 million Americans with both doses necessary to reach the 95% effectiveness rate. This news could result in tens of millions more Americans.
"Given the public health emergency, FDA is advising that it is acceptable to use every full dose obtainable," an agency spokesperson told Politico.
While thousands of small businesses are filing for bankruptcy, and Americans are struggling to pay their rent and mortgage, corporate America is raking in the dough.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that 45 of the 50 largest American companies scored a profit since March, when the COVID-19 crisis sparked lockdowns and quarantines. But the unfortunate number is that despite the corporate success, at least 27 of those 50 largest companies had layoffs, accounting for more than 100,000 Americans out of work.
"The data reveals a split screen inside many big companies this year. On one side, corporate leaders are touting their success and casting themselves as leaders on the road to economic recovery," the report said. "On the other, many of their firms have put Americans out of work and used their profits to increase the wealth of shareholders."
As the shutdowns began, large companies told the world that they were there to help. CEOs even took a pledge to focus more on employees and less on shareholders, only to lay off workers anyway.
"Berkshire Hathaway raked in profits of $56 billion during the first six months of the pandemic while one of its subsidiary companies laid off more than 13,000 workers," said the report. "Salesforce, Cisco Systems and PayPal cut staff even after their chief executives vowed not to do so. Companies sent thousands of employees packing while sending billions of dollars to shareholders. Walmart, whose CEO spent the past year championing the idea that businesses 'should not just serve shareholders,' nonetheless distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while laying off 1,200 corporate office employees."
The impending rental crisis is about to have large ripple effects too. A whopping 32 percent of renters entered September with pandemic-related rental debt. When anti-eviction regulations expire, those Americans will be thrown out of their homes. Even as the vaccine rolls out, it may come too late for some desperate to stay in their homes. Then there's the debt that piled up for the unpaid rent. If people are able to gather enough money to rent a new place, their credit will be trashed, making it harder to find housing.
Writing in the Washington Post this Wednesday, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin says that as Republicans and Democrats get closer to a new stimulus deal, there's no doubt that some in the Democratic base will be disappointed by what's in it.
"While the two Georgia Senate runoff races have yet to be decided, the long and tortured path to a possible deal tells us a lot about how the parties will operate in an era in which Democrats will control the White House and narrowly hold the House while the Senate remains closely divided and subject to a filibuster," she writes.
But saying "it's not enough," or "we should hold out for more" is rarely productive, according to Rubin.
"The stimulus package is a case in point. President-elect Joe Biden is telling Democrats to make the deal now — and then wait until he is in office to get more," she writes.
Hungarian-American scientist Katalin Kariko's obsession with researching a substance called mRNA to fight disease once cost her a faculty position at a prestigious university, which dismissed the idea as a dead end.
Now, her pioneering work -- which paved the way for the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines -- could be what saves the world from a 100-year pandemic.
"This is just kind of unbelievable," she told AFP in a video call from her home in Philadelphia, adding she was unused to the attention after toiling for years in obscurity.
It shows why "it's important science should be supported on many levels."
Kariko, 65, spent much of the 1990s writing grant applications to fund her investigations into "messenger ribonucleic acid" -- genetic molecules that tell cells what proteins to make, essential to keeping our bodies alive and healthy.
She believed mRNA held the key to treating diseases where having more of the right kind of protein can help -- like repairing the brain after a stroke.
But the University of Pennsylvania, where Kariko was on track for a professorship, decided to pull the plug after the grant rejections piled up.
"I was up for promotion, and then they just demoted me and expected that I would walk out the door," she said.
Back then, Kariko wasn't a US citizen and needed a job to renew her visa. She also knew she wouldn't be able to put her daughter through college without the hefty staff discount.
She decided to persist as a lower-rung researcher, scraping by on a meager salary.
It was a low point in her life and career, but "I just thought...you know, the (lab) bench is here, I just have to do better experiments," she said.
The experience shaped her philosophy for dealing with adversity in every aspect of life.
"Think through and then at the end of it, you have to say 'What can I do?'
"Because then you don't waste your life."
The determination runs in the family -- her daughter Susan Francia did go to Penn, where she earned a Master's degree, and won gold medals with the US Olympic rowing team in 2008 and 2012.
Twin breakthroughs -
Inside the body, mRNA delivers to cells the instructions stored in DNA, the molecules that carry all our genetic code.
By the late 1980s, much of the scientific community was focused on using DNA to deliver gene therapy, but Kariko believed that mRNA was also promising since most diseases are not hereditary and don't need solutions that permanently alter our genetics.
First though, she had to overcome a major problem: in animal experiments, synthetic mRNA was causing a massive inflammatory response as the immune system sensed an invader and rushed to fight it.
Kariko, together with her main collaborator Drew Weissman, discovered that one of the four building blocks of the synthetic mRNA was at fault -- and they could overcome the problem by swapping it out with a modified version.
They published a paper on the breakthrough in 2005. Then, in 2015, they found a new way to deliver mRNA into mice, using a fatty coating called "lipid nanoparticles" that prevent the mRNA from degrading, and help place it inside the right part of cells.
Both these innovations were key to the Covid-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, where Kariko is now a senior vice president, as well as the shots produced by Moderna.
Both work by giving human cells the instructions to make a surface protein of the coronavirus, which simulates an infection and trains the immune system for when it encounters the real virus.
New treatments
The mRNA quickly degrades and the instructions it gives the body aren't permanent, making the technology an ideal platform for a variety of applications, said Kariko.
These could range from new vaccines for influenza, faster to develop and more effective than the current generation, to new disease treatments.
For example, AstraZeneca is currently working on an mRNA treatment for heart failure patients, which delivers signalling proteins that stimulate the production of new blood vessels.
Though she does not want to make too much of it, as a foreign-born woman in a male-dominated field, she occasionally felt under-estimated -- saying people would approach after lectures and ask "Who's your supervisor?"
"They were always thinking, 'That woman with the accent, there must be somebody behind her who is smarter or something,'" she said.
Now, should everything go well with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it is not hard to imagine the Nobel Prize committee rewarding Kariko and fellow mRNA researchers.
That would be bittersweet for Kariko, whose late mother would call her every year after the announcements to ask why she hadn't been chosen.
"I told her, 'I never in my life get (federal) grants, I am nobody, not even faculty'" she would laugh. To which her mother would reply: "But you work so hard!"
The number of Americans who can’t get enough food is rising from already troubling levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 1 in 10 Americans said in November 2020 that their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the previous week, the U.S. Census Bureau found.
Food insecurity – what happens when someone doesn’t have enough money for food – is just as bad in Los Angeles County, home to one-quarter of California residents. These roughly 10 million people live primarily in urban areas like the cities of Los Angeles, Malibu, Hollywood and Compton.
The Los Angeles crisis surged the most in April, when 26% of all households – and 39% of low-income households – experienced food insecurity that month. By October, the situation had improved somewhat, with 11% of the county’s households and 17% of low-income households remaining food-insecure. The majority of these people are women, Latino, low-income and parents.
Even the lower rate in October was more than triple the norm before the pandemic: Some 5% of low-income households were likely to have experienced food insecurity in any given month of 2018, the most recent comparable data available.
Tracking food insecurity in Los Angeles County
Food insecurity has long been a challenge for Angelenos, especially people with low incomes, people of color and those living in neighborhoods that don’t have enough affordable healthy food.
So when the coronavirus pandemic began, I teamed up with other experts formed by USC Dornsife’s Public Exchange to track how this emergency would affect food security in this region. Our team includes scholars of public health, psychology, health policy, geography and data science. We met every week with the local government representatives leading efforts to address this issue and coordinated with several nonprofits that connect people with food and financial assistance.
Since April, we have surveyed 1,800 adults, who are representative of households in the county, to track their experiences.
We also partnered with Yelp, the local search and review site, which shared information about restaurants and grocery stores across the county, including which ones have closed or stayed open or added delivery services. This data helps us understand how easy or hard it is for people to get food in their own neighborhoods.
We’ve found that the biggest risk factors for food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic were having a low household income, being unemployed and being a young adult. People between the ages of 18 and 30 were most at risk, while those 65 or older were the least.
At times, restaurants, supermarkets and smaller food stores have curtailed their hours. Our community partners are concerned that it will be hard for independent restaurants and groceries to keep their doors open.
Health consequences
Not having enough to eat is a major public health concern, not only because it causes hunger and distress, but also because it’s linked to poor nutrition and unstable diet patterns.
For example, a family without enough money for food at the end of the month, when bills are due, may eat very little. That family might, when they have money, then stock up on cheaper foods that have lots of calories and will last a long time. Those shopping trips are unlikely to include many expensive fruits and vegetables.
This pattern helps explain why food insecurity increases risks for diet-related diseases, like diabetes and heart disease.
Perishable food tends to be higher in nutrients but harder for many low-income people to get.
The coronavirus pandemic has made it clearer than ever that the people in your life and where you live affect your health.
Stay-at-home orders are designed to limit the contact we have with family, friends and other acquaintances. These restrictions also make it harder for people to help and support one another during a crisis.
And we’re hearing that accessing food has been even harder than usual for people who rely on public transportation, with them having the extra risk of being exposed to the coronavirus.
The pandemic has also made it hard to connect with organizations that provide support. With the closure of many school buildings and community centers in Los Angeles County, local government staff and organizations have been working hard so that low-income kids and other residents can still get free or low-cost meals.
On top of all of this, the pandemic is causing huge challenges for emergency food donation programs. The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank has more than doubled the amount of food it gives away during the pandemic. Food pantries can’t always get enough food or volunteers to serve all of the people who show up.
On a recent call with a food pantry, I heard about how they went from serving 300 families a week before the pandemic to 4,000 a week now – and how hard it’s been to get enough food to distribute to everyone who lines up.
These emergency food programs just weren’t designed to cope with a crisis at such a big scale, or one that lasts for so long.
To better understand the landscape of food assistance in Los Angeles, we are getting comprehensive information about these programs through Aunt Bertha, a nationwide social care search-and-referral platform where people can search for many types of food assistance, from government programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to local food pantries and community gardens.
More Angelenos have also been getting other forms of governmental financial assistance, such as unemployment benefits, and obtaining aid from food pantries and the like.
Our findings also point to other opportunities that governments and community organizations have to help people get the food they need. For example, they can help small grocers in neighborhoods that don’t have many food stores stay open and provide subsidized food delivery to low-income people without cars.
We hope our study will help Los Angeles and other cities find opportunities to help everyone get enough to eat during the pandemic.
A health worker in Alaska suffered a serious allergic reaction after getting Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine and is now hospitalized but stable, a report said Wednesday.
The New York Times reported the person received their shot on Tuesday, and Pfizer confirmed it was working with local authorities to investigate the incident.
Two health workers in Britain had similar allergic reactions, causing the government there to tell people to avoid getting the shot if they had a history of severe allergies.
The US regulator issued an emergency approval with the warning that people who had known allergies to ingredients inside the vaccine should avoid it.
"We don't yet have all the details of the report from Alaska about a potential serious allergic reactions but are actively working with local health authorities to assess," a Pfizer spokesperson said.
"We will closely monitor all reports suggestive of serious allergic reactions following vaccination and update labeling language if needed."
Volunteers for Pfizer's clinical trial of 44,000 people were excluded if they had a history of allergic reactions to vaccines or components of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Overall, the trial found no serious safety issues, but regulators and the company are continuing to monitor for adverse events after vaccination.
The US is vaccinating some three million people this week with the vaccine, and hopes to reach a total of 20 million people this month if another vaccine, developed by Moderna, is approved.
A Black family in Texas are the victims of an apparently politically-oriented attack, according to a report from WWLTV.
When the couple woke up Tuesday morning, they found their cars on fire. When the smoke cleared they found the words "Trump 2020" spray-painted in their garage.
"That escalated things quickly," Jayla Gipson said. "We felt like we were targeted."
When police questioned Gipson and her partner Charles Crawford about any possible feuds they're involved in, the only thing they could think of was the fact that they had recently displayed a "Black Lives Matter" sign in their yard, which was vandalized with the same color spray paint that was used on the garage.
"That sign was in my yard for less than two weeks and then all of a sudden we get a tragedy like this," Gipson said.
A GoFundMe has also been set up for Gipson and Crawford as the two get back to normal.
The Americas reported some five million new Covid-19 infections in a week, mostly in the United States and Canada, the Pan American Health Organization said Wednesday.
Since the start of the pandemic the Americas region has recorded some 31 million cases and 787,000 deaths, which is roughly half the known infections and fatalities worldwide.
"In the last week alone, there were nearly five million new COVID-19 infections reported – most in North America, where Canada and the US continue to be the principal drivers of new cases," PAHO director Carissa Etienne told a press briefing.
"In Canada, hospitalizations are mounting... raising concerns about hospital capacity. In the US, deaths have surpassed 300,000, a milestone that underscores the human toll of this crisis," she added.
In Central America, the agency noted that Panama and Belize were registering an increase in cases, while Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua were reporting relatively few infections.
However, Etienne warned that this trend should be viewed with caution as hurricanes Eta and Iota may have impacted systems for recording Covid cases and there may also be many displaced people.
Regarding the situation in the south of the continent, Brazil and Colombia were the countries with the most new cases, and PAHO indicated that there was a worrying rise in infections in southern Brazil.
Former Trump appointee Paul Alexander didn't just advocate deliberately infecting millions of Americans with the novel coronavirus -- he also told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that they should not acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic was disproportionately harming Black Americans.
In an email obtained by Politico, Alexander acknowledged that it would be "very accurate" to say that "minority groups are at higher risk" of dying from the novel coronavirus.
However, he urged the CDC to avoid saying this publicly for political purposes.
"In this election cycle that is the kind of statement coming from the CDC that the media and Democrat antagonists will use against the president," Alexander wrote. "They are already doing it and accusing him directly of the deaths in the African American community from COVID."
He went on to argue that there was nothing that Trump could do to make it less likely that Black Americans would die of COVID-19 except to continue to provide a strong economy.
"The president's economic policies are the only way out," he wrote.
According to a new report from POLITICO, a former top Trump appointee urged for health officials to adopt a "herd immunity" approach to the coronavirus pandemic, allowing for millions of people to be infected.
“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD," then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.
"Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…" he added.
The news sparked a wave of outrage from President Trump's critics on Twitter.
A Trump-appointed official at the Department of Health and Human Services pushed for the government to allow millions more people to get infected with the novel coronavirus as a way to achieve "herd immunity."
Politico reports that emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee show that Trump-appointed former HHS science adviser Paul Alexander sent an email this past July outlining the case for herd immunity, which epidemiologists have said is akin to mass human sacrifice.
"There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus," he wrote. "PERIOD."
Alexander also wrote that "infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk... we want them infected."
In an email written later in the month, Alexander said the best strategy for handling the pandemic would be to "flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected" so that the disease would go through the population more quickly and burn itself out.
