Our live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has ended for the day.
The Supreme Court on Friday once again sided with houses of worship challenging regulations aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19 in California.
The court blocked so-called “gathering restrictions” in Santa Clara county that critics said treated churches differently than secular businesses in violation of the First Amendment.
The issue has bitterly divided the court and the three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor noted their dissent in an order issued after hours on Friday.
The court acted despite the fact that the restrictions are scheduled to be lifted next week.
The dispute was brought by several churches in California’s Santa Clara County which objected to a ban on all indoor gatherings including political events, weddings, funerals, movie showings and worship services.
Although on Feb. 5, the Supreme Court struck down state regulations that banned indoor worship services, the state allows counties to pass their own more strict rules.
In court papers, lawyers for the Santa Clara churches said the county “did just that.”
“The Santa Clara Director of Public Health forced worshipers outdoors in the heat and smoke of the summer and the cold and rain of autumn and winter,” Kevin T. Snider, a lawyer for the churches, argued in court papers.
State and local officials got draft plans for how the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will distribute Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine Friday, once it gets emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration.
They can start ordering vaccines as soon as Sunday, said an official who has seen the plans.
FDA advisers recommended EUA on Friday and the FDA has said it will move ahead quickly with the decision.
On Sunday, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will meet to discuss and vote on recommendations for the vaccine. But the CDC is ready to go and has put its plans into Tiberius, the federal government’s software platform used for distributing Covid-19 vaccines.
“In anticipation of everything going as planned on Sunday with the ACIP group, allocations have already been put into Tiberius for shipments next week,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
She said 3.9 million doses will be available for ordering right away. “About 2.8 million will go to state and local jurisdictions; 800,000 to the retail pharmacy program,” Freeman told CNN. She added that 70,000 will go to community vaccine centers and 90,000 to the federally qualified health centers. Ordering can begin on Sunday.
“For the initial week of distribution, orders will arrive one to two days after (they are) placed, and orders will be delivered by UPS or FedEx,” Freeman said. “The manufacturer information should be live after the EUA release, assuming that gets done tomorrow.”
Freeman said the 3.9 million doses from Johnson & Johnson could add at least 25% more Covid-19 vaccination capacity for states — since currently 14.5 million doses are allocated per week to states, tribes, and territories and 3.9 million represents about 26.9% of that.
A leading Brazilian public health institute warned on Friday that intensive care unit bed occupation in the country is at its worst level since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
A bulletin published Friday by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a highly regarded Brazilian research institute for public health, said that data gathered on Feb. 22 showed that ICU bed occupation for adult Covid-19 wards in public hospitals was above 80% in 12 of Brazil’s 26 states and in its federal district.
Seventeen state capitals also had high ICU bed usage, such as the Amazonian cities of Porto Velho (100%) and Manaus (94.6%), Fortaleza (94.4%) in the northeast, Goiânia (94.4%) in the central-western region, and the southern city of Florianópolis (96.2%), according to the report.
Brazil has routinely reported more than a thousand daily Covid-19 deaths since late December, including more than 1,500 on Feb. 25.
“The continued high levels of illness, as well as the burden on hospitals, may still be due to exposures that occurred at the end of 2020 and January of 2021, with end-of-year parties, clandestine festivals, and an intensification of travel,” the bulletin said.
An estimated 11.4 million workers will lose their unemployment benefits between mid-March and mid-April unless Congress passes its next coronavirus relief package in coming weeks, a recent study by The Century Foundation found.
The House bill would extend two key pandemic unemployment programs through Aug. 29. It would also increase the federal weekly boost to $400, from the current $300, and continue it for the same time period.
It would lengthen the duration of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program to up to 74 weeks, from 50 weeks, and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program to 48 weeks, from 24 weeks.
The former provides benefits to freelancers, gig workers, independent contracts and certain people affected by the pandemic, while the latter increases the duration of payments for those in the traditional state unemployment system.
The President’s plan had called for continuing the benefits through the end of September.
Out-of-work Americans will start running out of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation benefits in mid-March, when provisions in December’s $900 billion relief package begin phasing out.
The $300 enhancement also ends in mid-March.
People should get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine if it is made available to them, several public health experts told Congress Friday.
Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration recommended emergency use authorization Friday and top FDA officials said they would move to finalize EUA quickly.
People should not hesitate to get it, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told a House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee hearing.
“If had a J&J vaccine available today and a Moderna vaccine available tomorrow, I would be happy to take the J&J today. I don’t feel like I would need to wait. They are all terrific vaccines for the things that we care about,” Jha said.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine would be the first one-shot Covid-19 vaccine in the US and would be the first coronavirus vaccine approved by the FDA that uses a viral vector, a more common method of vaccine design – something that could help combat vaccine hesitancy, Ann Lewandowski, executive director of Wisconsin Immunization Neighborhood, said.
“There are some acceptability positives with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine,” Lewandowski said. “The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were subject to misinformation campaigns for months before they were released. And the mRNA technology is not well understood. And we were lucky that Johnson and Johnson has not had that same campaign, which means that some people who are distrustful of the Moderna and Pfizer platforms may be more willing to accept the Johnson & Johnson even if it seems like there is lower efficacy with that headline number.”
Jha said he hopes having an extra vaccine will help more people be immunized.
President Biden offered bipartisan praise for the work being done to combat Covid-19 and help Texans recover from last week’s winter storm.
“Let me say this. We’re not here today as Democrats or Republicans, we’re here today as Americans, American leaders with responsibility, all of us here in this parking lot, responsibilities to all the people we serve,” he told those gathered at a mass vaccination site in Houston.
Biden pointed to expanding vaccination efforts as another area ripe for bipartisan cooperation, pointing to Republicans Greg Abbott and John Cornyn, whom he met with over the course of the day. “There’s nothing partisan about this virus. It’s too long we’ve allowed the virus to divide us. I met today with Gov. Abbott, Sen. Cornyn conservative Republicans, I’m a Democratic president,” Biden said. “We disagree on plenty of things —there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are plenty of things we can work on together, and one of them is represented right here today, the effort to speed up vaccinations.”
On the news that the US Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee voted today to recommend the agency grant emergency use authorization to Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine, Biden said, “We’re going to use every conceivable way to expand manufacturing of the vaccine, the third vaccine, to make even more rapid progress and getting shots in people’s arms.”
Still, Biden warned that despite promising data, “cases and hospitalizations could go back up with new as new variants emerge, and it is not the time to relax.”
Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration said Friday it was easy to vote in favor of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine.
The 22 members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted unanimously Friday to recommend emergency use authorization of the vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine arm Janssen.
“I think it’s a relatively easy call. It clearly gets way over the bar and it’s nice to have a single-dose vaccine,” Dr. Eric Rubin, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said after the vote.
Several members stressed the urgency of fighting a pandemic that has killed more than half a million Americans.
“We’re dealing with a pandemic right now,” added Dr. Jay Portnoy, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri Kansas City school of medicine. “So there’s an urgency to get this done. We’re in a race between the virus mutating, new variants coming out that can cause further disease and stopping it,” he said.
“We need to get this vaccine out. I do believe the evidence supports its safety and effectiveness.”
Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration voted Friday to recommend the agency grant emergency use authorization to Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously to recommend EUA of the vaccine in people 18 and older.
If the FDA acts on the recommendation – and it’s expected to do so quickly – the vaccine will become the third authorized for use in the US. It will be the first one-shot vaccine, and one that can be stored in regular refrigerators, making it easier to distribute than the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which are more delicate and require two doses.
The vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine arm, Janssen, was tested in advanced clinical trials in more than 44,000 people in the US, South Africa and Latin America. Globally, it showed an overall efficacy of 66% in preventing moderate to severe disease. In the US, this efficacy was 72% and it was 85% effective in preventing severe disease. No one who got the vaccine died of Covid-19 during the trial.
What happens next: If the FDA issues an EUA, it could come as soon as Friday night. It’s up to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to decide whether the vaccine should actually be given to Americans. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has scheduled a meeting for Sunday to take up the question. ACIP will vote on Sunday afternoon on whether the CDC should OK the vaccine’s distribution and may also designate priority groups.
The CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, will then give the final go-ahead.
The US federal government says it’s ready to distribute up to 4 million doses of the vaccine immediately.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted new recommendations Friday on the importance of good ventilation in preventing coronavirus spread in schools and daycares. Its top recommendation: Open a window.
It’s the first time the agency has separately emphasized the role ventilation plays in helping or preventing the spread of the virus, which is transmitted in tiny particles called aerosols, as well as via larger articles.
“Open windows in transportation vehicles. Use exhaust fans in restrooms and kitchens.”
Mask use can prevent the virus from getting into the air in the first place, the CDC said on the newly posted web page. But good ventilation is also important.
“Use child-safe fans to increase the effectiveness of open windows. Safely secure fans in a window to blow potentially contaminated air out and pull new air in through other open windows and doors,” it adds. “Consider having activities, classes, or lunches outdoors when circumstances allow.”
The new guidance also addresses heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. “Set HVAC systems to bring in as much outdoor air as your system will safely allow,” it suggests. “Increase the HVAC system’s total airflow supply to occupied spaces when you can. More air flow encourages air mixing and ensures any recirculated air passes through the filter more frequently.”
Filtration is also important, but filters should not reduce airflow.
California is anticipating a delivery of 380,300 Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine doses by next week, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in a news conference Friday.
According to Newsom, the state is administering more vaccines than it is receiving. About 1.4 million vaccines doses are being administered on a weekly basis and the goal is to ramp it up to four million doses once there’s enough supply.
So far, the state has administered 8.2 million doses of vaccine.
“There’s bright light at the end of the tunnel,” said Newsom, a phrase the governor has been sharing to reflect declining Covid-19 case numbers, deaths, and hospitalizations.
One month ago, there were 17,000 active Covid-19 cases in the state and cases are now down by more than a third at 5,400, Newsom said. The positivity rate has also dropped from 7.9% to 2.7%.
The governor on Monday announced that 34,000 doses would be redistributed to hard-hit agricultural communities in the state, like in California’s Central Valley, increasing doses up by 60% with 11 new vaccination sites in the area.
Newsom was joined by state lawmakers and actor George Lopez during today’s news conference at a vaccination site in Fresno, California.
Remember: The Johnson and Johnson vaccine has not yet received emergency use authorization in the US. Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisers are meeting today to discuss the potential emergency authorization of this third coronavirus vaccine for the US public.
It’s the next step in a process that could end with the new vaccine’s rollout early next week. As with the two currently authorized vaccines, advisers and federal agencies are meeting over a weekend to try to get the vaccines to the US public as soon as possible.
CNN’s Maggie Fox contributed reporting to this post.
US Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar said it is “unacceptable” that the Senate parliamentarian has ruled against including a $15 minimum wage increase in the Covid-19 relief bill.
The House will vote on their bill tonight with the increase included, but the Senate is expected to have to strip the minimum wage provision out when it votes on the Covid-19 bill next. Then eventually the House will have to pass that bill again at the end of the process.
“It is unacceptable, I believe, for us to continue to come up with excuses on why we can’t do the right thing for the American people,” Omar said to CNN’s John King in an interview today.
When asked if progressives could stop the package, Omar said “it’s really important for us to use every single opportunity we have to engage in this fight to provide an actual path to increasing the minimum wage.”
“People have been waiting for a really long time. This is our one chance that we get, and I think it’s really important … We might succeed. If not, we have to look at the options in the House when the bill returns to us,” she added.
Omar said that the minimum wage hike has been campaigned on for over a decade, and voters expect lawmakers to keep their promises on it.
Watch the interview:
Now is not the time to experiment with changing the two-dose schedule set for the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in conversation with the Journal of the American Medical Association on Friday.
Outside factors such as emerging variants make it difficult to try and extend the time between doses right now, Messonnier said.
“For me right now, it’s the wrong moment to dial back. We’re looking at the science carefully,” Messonnier said, adding that this and other questions will be discussed Monday at a meeting of the CDC’s vaccine advisers.
As the pandemic continues to impact the US, the major order of business for President Biden and Congress is to pass a $1.9 trillion Covid relief package before the round of unemployment benefits and other aid approved in December lapse, again leaving millions of Americans short of help.
What’s riding on this negotiation is the $1,400 stimulus checks proposed by Biden even before he took office, as well as that extra federal unemployment money. Democrats have said they will get a bill signed by mid-March.
Here are three key things to know about the legislation proposed by House Democrats that will be voted on today:
But getting the proposal — proposals, really, since there will be different versions between the House, Senate and White House that must be reconciled — passed into law will test Biden’s calls for unity.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters that “one or two” Democrats could vote against the Covid relief bill tonight, but is confident the bill will pass.
“I expect to have overwhelming Democratic support for it,” Hoyer said. “Expecting unanimity all the time is a little tougher.”
Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader, who is the only remaining House Democrat who voted against the $15 minimum wage bill in 2019 that is still a member of Congress, told reporters he is “not so sure” he will be voting for the package tonight.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told CNN’s Manu Raju that not all Democrats will vote for the bill tonight but it will pass. He said they can only afford to lose three votes.
More on the House relief package: Progressives have fought to include a minimum wage increase in the legislation, but that effort was dealt a major blow on Thursday when the Senate parliamentarian ruled against including the increase in the Covid relief bill, an aide familiar with the process and two sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell CNN.
As a result, when the House passes their bill with the increase included, the Senate is expected to have to strip the minimum wage provision out and then eventually, the bill would go back to the House and face another vote.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, on Friday said that countries making deals with Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers providing vaccines to COVAX are undermining the effort to vaccinate people around the world.
Tedros did not name any countries making such deals.
COVAX is an entity run by a coalition that includes the Vaccine Alliance known as Gavi and the World Health Organization (WHO), and is funded by donations from governments, multilateral institutions and foundations.
Its mission is to buy coronavirus vaccines in bulk and send them to poorer nations that can’t compete with wealthy countries in securing contracts with the major drug companies.
Two countries – Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire – have now received vaccine doses from COVAX and the Serum Institute of India, Tedros said, and more doses will go to more countries in the coming weeks.
There’s progress toward the target of starting vaccination in all countries in the first 100 days of the year, “but that progress is fragile,” he said.
He said that now is the time to do everything to scale up production, including licensing, technology transfer and intellectual property waivers, when necessary.
While Tedros said that he understood that governments have an obligation to protect their people, the best way to do it is to suppress the virus everywhere at once.
Tedros said that the distribution of diagnostics, oxygen and dexamethasone also needs to be accelerated, as “although vaccines are a very powerful tool, they’re not the only tool.”
The House of Representatives is expected to vote Friday evening to approve President Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package, a major step toward enacting the first legislative priority of the new administration as the devastating fallout from the spread of Covid-19 has left Americans in dire need of further relief.
The package advanced by House Democrats includes direct aid to small businesses, $1,400 direct checks to Americans making less than $75,000 annually, an increase in the child tax credit, direct funding to state and local governments, funding for schools and more money for vaccine distribution.
It is expected to pass on a party line vote as House Republicans have urged their members to vote against the package and are seeking to limit defections.
Republicans have argued that the legislation overreaches and serves as a liberal wish list of agenda items and complain that they have been locked out of the process for crafting the measure.
Democrats counter that they are willing to work with Republicans, but will not water down the plan and say they have a mandate to take sweeping action to address the pandemic now that they control Congress and the White House.
What happens next: If the bill passes in the House, it will then be up to the Senate, which is using the reconciliation process. The process allows lawmakers to bypass the 60-vote threshold typically required for breaking filibusters and moving legislation forward. Whatever version the Senate approves would also have to pass through the House.
Current expanded unemployment benefits run out March 14. That’s the date by which Democrats have said they must have the Covid relief bill passed into law.
“We are on track to get this bill done and get it on the President’s desk before the expiration of the enhanced unemployment benefits, which is March 14,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday.
See full breakdown of what’s in the most recent bill proposed in the House is here.
CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf contributed reporting to this post.
About 70.5 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, according to data published Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC reported that 70,454,064 total doses have been administered, about 75% of the 94,300,910 doses delivered.
That’s about 2.2 million more administered doses reported since yesterday, for a seven-day average of nearly 1.6 million doses per day.
More than 14% of the US population – more than 47 million people – have now received at least one dose of vaccine and nearly 7% of the population – about 22.6 million people – have been fully vaccinated with both shots, CDC data shows.
Note: Data published by the CDC may be delayed, and doses may not have been given on the day reported.
Nigeria expects to receive its first 4 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines next week from the global COVAX vaccine program, said Walter Kazadi Mulombo, the World Health Organization representative in Nigeria.
Mulombo on Friday added that Nigeria was expecting 14 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in total.
“WHO more recently supported the country to develop its vaccine deployment and vaccination plan for Covid-19,” Mulombo told journalists in a virtual briefing. “It has been used to secure through the COVAX Facility close to 14 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and four million of which are expected next week.”
The situation in Nigeria was so far much better than had been widely predicted early in the outbreak, said Chikwe Ihekweazu, director general of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with some 200 million people, has reported fewer than 1,900 Covid-19 deaths so far, according to government data.
The COVAX initiative is led jointly by WHO, Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and UNICEF, which is leading vaccine procurement and delivery operations. So far this week, the COVAX initiative has delivered vaccines to Ghana and Ivory Coast.
Health Canada announced Friday it has authorized AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccines for use.
The authorization of the AstraZeneca vaccine developed with Oxford University and the Serum Institute of India’s version of the AstraZeneca vaccine introduce the first viral vector-based Covid-19 vaccines, and the third and fourth authorized Covid-19 vaccines in Canada.
The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines are already authorized for use in Canada.
Health Canada received an application for authorization from AstraZeneca on Oct. 1 and Serum Institute of India on Jan. 23. The authorization of the Serum Institute of India’s vaccine depended on the clinical trial results’ comparability to that of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Supriya Sharma, Health Canada’s chief medical adviser, said at a news conference Friday.
Health Canada, which has been reviewing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine since Nov. 30, is expecting additional information from Janssen Pharmaceuticals, specifically on manufacturing, later today, she said.
“[An authorization of the J&J vaccine] can go quite quickly if that information is all in order,” Sharma responded when asked if an authorization from Health Canada will promptly follow the US Food and Drug Administration’s anticipated emergency use authorization.
The Novavax Covid-19 vaccine, which was submitted for review on Jan. 29, is currently undergoing a Phase 3 clinical trial, Sharma said. Health Canada expects the results from the trial at the beginning of April.
“We are expecting to reach a regulatory decision on these vaccines on a similar timeline to other international regulators, such as the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency,” Sharma said. “This is all very promising news.”
Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine “checks nearly all the boxes” on a list of what’s needed in a coronavirus vaccine, Dr. Greg Poland, head of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, said Friday.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is safe and effective, and has the advantage of being a single-dose vaccine that has no special storage requirements, Poland told a meeting of vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration.
“The Janssen vaccine candidate checks nearly all the boxes.”
The FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) is meeting to discuss the vaccine and will vote later Friday on whether to recommend FDA emergency use authorization. The FDA almost always follows the committee’s recommendations.
“There are only three ways the pandemic can be controlled,” Poland told the committee. “First is a hard lockdown,” with universal masking and social distancing, he said. “Second, the virus mutates to be less transmissible,” he added – but noted that more transmissible variants are already emerging and spreading.
Third is vaccination. “Vaccines are our primary weapons in countering and controlling this threat,” Poland said.
He noted the vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen division was studied in multiple countries when the virus was spreading fast – and when new variants were circulating.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which, if authorized, would be the third to be OK’d for the US, provided 85% protection against severe disease and the need for hospitalized in advanced, Phase 3 clinical trials.
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