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On Saturday, Professor John Edmunds, a member of Sage - the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies which advises the government - said the levels of coronavirus were still "very high", adding that it was a "political decision" to ease measures.

In Wales, people from two different households will be able to meet each other outdoors from Monday.

And Phil Anderson, head of policy at the MS Society, said people would "rightly want to hear a lot more about the scientific evidence showing this will be safe for them".

Widespread testing forms a central part of the government's strategy to control the virus, as it aims to ease blanket lockdown in favour of more targeted measures.

The UK's R value - the number of people each infected person passes the virus on to, on average - is currently between 0.7 and 0.9.

President TrumpDonald John TrumpBiden says GOP senators have called to congratulate him Biden: Trump attending inauguration is 'of consequence' to the country Biden says family will avoid business conflicts MORE has been largely silent when it comes to warning the public about the need for precautions or announcing major new steps aimed at curbing the spread of the virus before a vaccine is widely available.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield warned on Wednesday that December, January and February are “going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”

Even though some of those warnings were aimed at the public, the White House did not release the report and instead sent it privately to states. The document came to light only after it was leaked to the press.

The U.S. is already being hit with 150,000 new cases a day, as well as a record 100,000-plus coronavirus patients in hospitals and more than 2,500 deaths from the virus on Wednesday alone. Those numbers are expected to worsen as more people test positive after a surge of Thanksgiving travel and gatherings.

The White House coronavirus task force sent a report, dated Sunday, to states sounding the alarm on several fronts, including that “a further post-Thanksgiving surge will compromise COVID patient care, as well as medical care overall” as hospitals are overwhelmed.

state responses “remain inadequate” in “many areas” and called for measures like limiting or closing indoor dining, which many states have not done.

Trump administration health officials are issuing increasingly dire warnings about the coronavirus and its rapid spread across the country, drawing a sharp contrast to the president’s reluctance to acknowledge the severity of the crisis head-on.

Some health experts said that given Trump’s history of making skeptical and at times misleading remarks about the coronavirus, his relative silence on the topic might be better than having him undercut the messaging from public health agencies.

“I’d rather he be quiet than step on the message of the CDC, which appears to be waking back up and providing useful guidance.”

“He's been hard at work,” she added. “He's done I don't know how many coronavirus task force briefings from this podium. But the work he's done speaks for itself.”

When Trump has spoken about coronavirus recently, it has been to tout progress on the vaccine, which has indeed progressed at record speed and shown very promising safety and efficacy results. But the vaccine will not be widely available for several months, highlighting the need for other measures in the short term to get through the brutal winter months.

“If you can loot businesses, burn down buildings, engage in protest, you can also go to a Christmas party, you can celebrate the holiday of Christmas, and you can do it responsibly.

the White House has the authority to intervene where this type of guidance is concerned, t

The president on Monday cautioned Americans against letting the virus “dominate” them or “take over” their lives, indicating a vaccine was imminent.

The president has repeatedly said a vaccine could be approved by November, including during last week’s presidential debate.

Several companies are in the final stages of clinical trials, but that requirement would make it unlikely that a vaccine would receive approval before Nov. 3.

The novel coronavirus has infected more than 7.4 million Americans and killed at least 210,127.

Staff members at the budget office scrutinize the documents for statements that could undercut the president’s public message that the administration either has the pandemic under control or will soon, according to former and current federal officials.

The testing and release of a vaccine is an issue that has gained wide national attention. Mr. Trump has repeatedly misrepresented how quickly a vaccine might be available to most Americans, promising a major breakthrough in vaccine development as early as this month.

Some vaccine makers, including Johnson & Johnson, have publicly indicated that they will follow the agency’s recommendations, regardless of the White House’s actions.

In addition to the two-month follow-up period, the guidelines stated that there should be at least five cases of severe infection in the placebo group as evidence that a vaccine is effective in preventing more than just mild to moderate illness. About 10 percent of Covid-19 cases are considered severe.

I never met a cabdriver who had been swab-tested less than twice, and a couple had been tested five times. Most of the cabbies had no relatives or friends who had been infected; swabbing was simply required by the city and by their cab companies.

When Wuhan was sealed, the strategy of isolation was replicated throughout the city. Housing compounds were closed and monitored by neighborhood committees, with residents going out only for necessities.

Toward the end of the first month, the guidelines were tightened further, until virtually all goods were delivered. On February 17th, Fang Fang wrote, “Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times.”

Meanwhile, approximately ten thousand contact tracers were working in the city, in order to cut off chains of infection, and hospitals were developing large-scale testing systems. But isolation remained crucial: patients were isolated; suspected exposures were isolated; medical workers were isolated.

Zhang said the experience of working through the pandemic had left him calmer and more patient. He drove more carefully now; he wasn’t in such a rush.

I often asked Wuhan residents how they had been personally changed by the spring, and there was no standard response. Some expressed less trust in government information; others said they had increased faith in the national leadership.

Wuhan had most recently reported a locally transmitted symptomatic case on May 18th. It’s the most thoroughly tested city in China: at the end of May, in part to boost confidence, the government tried to test every resident, a total of eleven million.

There are three hundred and twenty-one testing locations in the city, and the system is so extensive that in June, when Beijing suffered an outbreak, Wuhan hospitals sent seventy-two staffers to the capital to help with tests.

“I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me, in a phone conversation. According to her, it’s unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped this particular virus at its source. “I’ve always believed that this thing was going to spread,” she said

The physician who handled testing told me that, on average, his hospital still recorded one positive for every forty thousand exams. Most of these positives were repeat patients: after having been infected during the initial run of the virus, they recovered fully, and then for some reason, months later, showed evidence of the virus again. So far, most of the positives had been asymptomatic, and the physician saw no indication that the virus was spreading in the city.

In town, there were few propaganda signs about the epidemic, and Wuhan newspapers ran upbeat headlines every morning (Yangtze Daily, August 29th, front page: “STUDENTS DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS”). Movie theatres were open; restaurants and bars had no seating restrictions. At the Hanyang Renxinghui Mall, I saw barefaced kids playing in what may have been one of the last fully functioning ball pits on earth, a sight that seemed worthy of other headlines (“CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN WUHAN BALL PITS”).

Across town, colleges and universities were in the process of bringing back more than a million students. Wuhan has the second-highest number of students of any city in China, after Guangzhou.

Wuhan memories remained fresh, and the materials of documentation were also close at hand. People sometimes handed over manuscripts, and they took out their phones and pulled up photographs and messages from January and February. But I wondered how much of this material would dissipate over time.

In town, I met two Chinese journalists in their twenties who were visiting from out of town. They had been posted during the period of the sealed city: back then, anybody sent to cover events in Wuhan had to stay for the long haul.

One was a director of streaming media whom I’ll call Han, and he had found that government-run outlets generally wanted footage that emphasized the victory over the disease, not the suffering of Wuhan residents. Han hoped that eventually he’d find other ways to use the material. “It will be in the hard drive,” he said, tapping his camera.

After that, Yin reported on a number of issues that couldn’t be published or completed, and she often talked with scientists and officials who didn’t want to say too much. “One person said, ‘Ten years later, if the climate has changed, I’ll tell you my story,’ ” Yin told me. “He knew that he would be judged by history.” She continued, “These people are inside the system, but they also know that they are inside history.”

In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemic—a period of isolation is crucial. Throughout the Communist era, there have been many moments of quarantined history: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In every case, an initial silencing has been followed by sporadic outbreaks of leaked information. Wuhan will eventually follow the same pattern, but for the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city.

When I spoke with scientists outside China, they weren’t focussed on the government’s early missteps

Such fare is much more popular in Guangdong, in the far south. It’s possible that the disease arrived from somewhere else and then spread in the wet, cool conditions of the fish stalls. A few Wuhan residents told me that a considerable amount of their seafood comes from Guangdong, and they suggested that perhaps a southerner had unwittingly imported the disease,

Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, pointed out that Chinese scientists had quickly sequenced the virus’s genome, which was made available to researchers worldwide on January 11th. “I honestly think that they had a horrific situation in Wuhan and they were able to contain it,” she said. “There were mistakes early on, but they did act, and they shared fast.”

For much of El-Sadr’s career, she has worked on issues related to AIDS in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. After years of research, scientists eventually came to the consensus that H.I.V. most likely started through the bushmeat trade—the first human was probably infected after coming into contact with a primate or primate meat.

El-Sadr views the coronavirus as another inevitable outcome of people’s encroachment on the natural world. “We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the H.I.V. and the COVID pandemics,” she wrote to me, in an e-mail. “Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.”

There’s a tendency to believe that we would know the source of the coronavirus if the Chinese had been more forthcoming, or if they hadn’t cleaned out the Huanan market before stalls and animals could be studied properly.

But Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years on research on bat coronaviruses, told me that it’s typical to fail to gather good data from the site of an initial outbreak. Once people get sick, local authorities inevitably focus on the public-health emergency. “You send in the human doctors, not the veterinarians,” he said, in a phone conversation. “And the doctors’ response is to clean out the market. They want to stop the infections.”

Daszak believes the virus probably circulated for weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, and he doubts that the city was the source. “There are bats in Wuhan, but it was the wrong time of year,” he told me. “It was winter, and bats are not out as much.”

His research has indicated that, across Southeast Asia, more than a million people each year are infected by bat coronaviruses. Some individuals trap, deal, or raise animals that might serve as intermediary hosts. “But generally it’s people who live near bat caves,”

Daszak said that he had always thought that such an outbreak was most likely to occur in Kunming or Guangzhou, southern cities that are close to many bat caves and that also have an intensive wildlife trade.

He thinks that Chinese scientists are probably now searching hospital freezers for lab samples of people who died of pneumonia shortly before the outbreak. “You would take those samples and look for the virus,” he said. “They’ll find something eventually. These things just don’t happen overnight; it requires a lot of work. We’ve seen this repeatedly with every disease. It turns out that it was already trickling through the population.”

Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in New York. EcoHealth has become the target of conspiracy theorists, including some who claim that the virus was man-made. Daszak and many prominent virologists say that anything created in a lab would show clear signs of manipulation.

There’s also speculation that the outbreak started when researchers accidentally released a coronavirus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But there’s no evidence of a leak, or even that the institute has ever studied a virus that could cause a COVID-19 outbreak.

“Scientists in China are under incredible pressure to publish,” Daszak said. “It really drives openness and transparency.”

He has spent a good deal of time in Wuhan, and co-authored more than a dozen papers with Chinese colleagues. “If we had found a virus that infected human cells and spread within a cell culture, we would have put the information out there,” he said. “In sixteen years, I’ve never come across the slightest hint of subterfuge. They’ve never hidden data. I’ve never had a situation where one lab person tells me one thing and the other says something else. If you were doing things that you didn’t want people to know about, why would you invite foreigners into the lab?”

In April, President Trump told reporters that the U.S. should stop funding research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shortly after Trump’s comments, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $3.7-million grant to EcoHealth, which had been studying how bat coronaviruses are transmitted to people.

I asked Daszak why, if he has such faith in the openness of his Wuhan colleagues, the Chinese government has been so closed about other aspects of the outbreak. He said that science is one thing, and politics something else; he thinks that officials were embarrassed about the early mistakes, and in response they simply shut down all information.

At the beginning of July, China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceutical company called Sinopharm, completed construction of a vaccine-manufacturing plant in Wuhan. The project began while the city was still sealed. “That’s the politically correct thing to do,” a Shanghai-based biotech entrepreneur told me. “To show the world that the heroic people of Wuhan have come back.”

Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, told me that the C.N.B.G. vaccine has already been given to a number of Chinese government officials, under an emergency-use approval granted by the authorities. “I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine,” he said, in a phone conversation. He thought that the total number was probably around a hundred. “It’s middle-level officials,” he said. “Vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.”

Pharmaceutical executives have also been expected to lead the way, like the construction manager who donned P.P.E. in order to escort his workers into the patient ward. “Every senior executive at Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated,” He said. “Including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-president—everyone.” The Chinese press has reported that vaccinations have also been administered to hundreds of thousands of citizens in high-risk areas around the world.

In the West, China’s image has been badly damaged by the pandemic and by other recent events. The country has tightened political crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and, in May, after Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, China responded furiously, placing new tariffs and restrictions on Australian goods ranging from barley to beef.

But He believes that the situation is fluid. “All of these feelings can turn around quickly,” he told me. “I think that once China has a vaccine, and if they can help other countries, it can make a huge difference.”

There’s also a competitive element. “China wants to beat America,” He said. He believes that the C.N.B.G. vaccine will receive some level of approval for public use by the end of October. “Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election,” he said. “So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.”

No matter how quickly the Chinese develop a vaccine, or how effectively they have handled the pandemic since January, it’s unlikely to make Westerners forget the mistakes and misinformation during the pandemic’s earliest phase.

Some of this is due to a cultural difference—the Chinese response to errors is often to look forward, not back. On January 31st, Fang Fang commented in her diary, “The Chinese people have never been fond of admitting their own mistakes, nor do they have a very strong sense of repentance.” It’s often hard for them to understand why this quality is so frustrating for Westerners. In this regard, the pandemic is truly a mirror—it doesn’t allow the Chinese to look out and see themselves through the eyes of others.

The pandemic illuminates both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Chinese system, as well as the relationship between the government and the people. They know each other well: officials never felt the need to tell citizens exactly what happened in Wuhan, but they understood that American-level casualties would have been shocking—given China’s population, the tally would have been more than a million and counting.

In order to avoid death on that scale, the government also knew that people would be willing to accept strict lockdowns and contribute their own efforts toward fighting the virus.

In turn, citizens were skilled at reading their government. People often held two apparently contradictory ideas: that the Party lied about some things but gave good guidance about others. More often than not, citizens could discern the difference. During the pandemic, it was striking that, when the Chinese indulged in conspiracy theories, these ideas rarely resulted in personally risky behavior, as they often did in the U.S.

Perhaps the Chinese have been inoculated by decades of censorship and misinformation: in such an environment, people develop strong instincts for self-preservation, and they don’t seem as disoriented by social media as many Americans are.

Early in the year, I corresponded by WeChat with a Wuhan pharmacist who worked in a hospital where many were infected. On February 26th, he expressed anger about the early coverup. “My personal opinion is that the government has always been careless and suppressed dissent,” he wrote. “Because of this, they lost a golden opportunity to control the virus.”

In Wuhan, we met a few times, and during one of our conversations I showed him what he had written in February. I asked what he would do now if he found himself in Li Wenliang’s position, aware of an outbreak of some unknown disease. Would he post a warning online? Contact a health official? Alert a journalist?The pharmacist thought for a moment. “I would tell my close friends in person,” he said. “But I wouldn’t put anything online. Nothing in writing.”

I asked if such an event would turn out differently now.“It would be the same,” he said. “It’s a problem with the system.”

He explained that, with an authoritarian government, local officials are afraid of alarming superiors, which makes them inclined to cover things up. But, once higher-level leaders finally grasp the truth, they can act quickly and effectively.

Dogged by skepticism and inconsistent funding, these coronavirus researchers were stymied from developing treatments and vaccines for SARS—many of which could have been helpful in the current crisis.

funding declines hobbled individual investigators who weren’t part of these larger consortia. Pharmaceutical companies that develop vaccines and therapies scaled back on coronavirus research, too. Within a few years after the SARS outbreak, public health funding agencies both in the United States and abroad “no longer regarded coronaviruses as a high public health threat compared to other diseases,” Saif wrote in an email.

to some experts whose business it is to hunt potential pathogens before they spill over into human populations, the many years spent not girding for a serious coronavirus outbreak were tragically—and unnecessarily—wasted.

“We were out there on the ground after SARS, working on coronaviruses with Chinese colleagues in collaboration,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York–based nonprofit group that took part in a large federally funded effort, called Predict, to hunt for new pandemic viruses in wildlife in 31 countries, including China. That program was famously defunded last fall, just before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began.

“But we were the only group of western scientists,” Daszak added. “How can we be the only people looking for these viruses when there was such a clear and present danger?”

when SARS emerged in late 2002, there was initially “general disbelief among medical people that a coronavirus could be the basis of such a huge outbreak.”

As that epidemic spread, an influx of new researchers crowded the field. More grants were awarded, and funding started to climb. “Everyone wanted to know where the virus had come from,” said Ralph Baric, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. Initial findings pointed to wild civets and raccoon dogs sold for meat and pelts, respectively, in Chinese markets. Later evidence began to implicate horseshoe bats as the original source of the infections. Some researchers whose pre-SARS careers had been grounded in basic coronavirus biology began working on therapies and vaccines—and they made steady progress for several years.

Another similarly affected researcher was Brenda Hogue, a virologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. Hogue had devoted her career to studying coronaviruses, focusing on the protein machinery that drives their assembly. After SARS, she and her colleagues turned part of their attention toward developing a vaccine. But when the funding dropped off in 2008, she said, the vaccine went into limbo “and we put our efforts into other directions.”

Then on May 12, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese government was responding in kind, “by stalling international efforts to find the source of the [SARS-CoV-2] virus amid an escalating U.S. push to blame China for the pandemic.”

To demonstrate that a particular virus is actually harmful to people, scientists need to isolate and culture the microbe and show it infects human cells in the lab

Led by virologist Zheng-Li Shi, the Wuhan team reported in 2013 that this particular virus, called WIV1, binds with ACE2 in civet and human cells, and then replicates efficiently inside them. “That was the red flag,” Saif said. Earlier evidence suggested that direct contact with these bats could lead to viral spillover in humans. “Now there was proof of that.”

The bats had been trapped in a cave in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province. At least seven other SARS-like strains were present in that same colony, leading the researchers to speculate that bat coronaviruses remained “a substantial global threat to public health.”

They created a hybrid microbe by attaching the spike protein from SHC014 to the genetic backbone of a SARS-like virus that was previously adapted to grow in mice. Called a chimera—an organism containing cells with more than one genotype—this lab-made microbe had no problem binding with ACE2 and infecting human cells. Baric’s research team concluded that like WIV1, any SARS-like viruses outfitted with the SHC014 spike could pose cross-species threats to people.

Baric acknowledged the risky nature of the research but emphasized the safety protocols. “In general, we don’t know the transmissibility or virulence potential of any bat viruses or chimeras,” Baric said in an email message. “Hence it’s best to keep and work with them under biosafety level 3 laboratory conditions to maximize safety.”

Baric also pointed out that a chimera would display a genetic signature “that says what it is.” The adjoining parts of a chimera segregate discreetly in a logical pattern.

A genetic analysis of the chimera produced in his lab, for instance, “would come out to be mouse-adapted SARS everywhere but the spike, which is SHC014.” Similar logical patterns are absent in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that the virus that causes COVID-19 evolved naturally.

ven as Baric and others were generating lab evidence that more SARS-like viruses were poised for human emergence, another outbreak—in pigs, not people—provided another strong and recent signal: Some 25,000 piglets were killed by a coronavirus in the Guangdong province of China, starting in 2016. That virus, too, was found in horseshoe bats, and Buchmeier described the outbreak as both a major cross-species spillover and a warning shot that was never really picked up by the broader public-health community.

The EcoHealth Alliance, which had been part of the Predict effort, maintained its own collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology using funds supplied by the National Institutes of Health. But on April 24, the Trump administration—which is investigating whether SARS-CoV-2 escaped accidentally from the Wuhan Institute, an allegation that’s been broadly discredited—directed the NIH to cut off that support.

hen cases of those diseases fell off, public-health responders shifted to other viral emergencies such as Ebola and Zika, and coronavirus research funding dropped sharply.

To disease experts, the bickering is a worrying—perhaps even astonishing—indicator that at least some global leaders still aren’t hearing what they have to say about the threat of coronaviruses, and Baric asserted that the ongoing pandemic exposes the need for better communication between countries, not less. “That is absolutely key,” he said. “Critical information needs to be passed as quickly as possible.”

Many other warnings would follow.Indeed, evidence of a looming and more deadly coronavirus pandemic had been building for years. Yet experts who specialize in coronaviruses—a large family of pathogens, found especially in birds and mammals, that can cross over to humans from other mammals and cause varying degrees of illness—struggled to convince a broader audience of the risk

the number of coronavirus-research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health—which had increased from a low of 28 in 2002 to a peak of 103 in 2008—went into a tailspin.

Though support for coronavirus research spiked a bit with the MERS outbreak in 2012, the increase was short-lived. Since that outbreak was quickly contained, the disease didn’t raise wider concerns and grant opportunities declined further.

Ironically, just as funding for drugs and vaccines was drying up, evidence that other coronavirus threats lurked in wildlife was only getting stronger

Ten years would pass, however, before researchers could show there were other SARS-like viruses in nature that also bind with ACE2. The evidence came from a team based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Wallace was experiencing a psychological episode on Monday, according to a family attorney. His mother attempted to calm him, the lawyer said, but was unable to and called 911 for an ambulance. But the police arrived first.

"As Black Lives Matter protests demanding justice for Walter Wallace Jr. will likely converge with demonstrations related to the elections, Philadelphia's history of using tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray against its own citizens also looms large," according to a statement from the council.

The Philadelphia City Council on Thursday approved a measure that would bar the use of non-lethal crowd dispersal tactics, including the use of rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray on those peacefully protesting.

This spring, the pandemic prompted unprecedented polling place consolidations during the primaries in jurisdictions across the U.S., sparking an outcry over images of voters standing in hours-long lines in places such as Milwaukee and Atlanta. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for election administrators to "maintain or increase the total number of polling places available to the public on Election Day to improve the ability to social distance." The guidance also says to avoid increasing the number of potential registered voters assigned to each polling place "unless there is no other option."

Everything about the act of voting in 2020 has been shaken by COVID-19. A record number of ballots have been cast early, either by mail or in person. All over the country, sports teams are turning over their arenas to be used as large-scale, socially distanced polling places.

Iowa voters won't be able to cast their ballot at any of those polling places this Election Day because of hundreds of closures and consolidations that have rippled across the state due to the coronavirus pandemic.

"I'm certain that it's going to make it harder for people to vote. But I am seeing a resolve right now, where people are determined," Brown said. "Whatever you do, we're going to counteract it."

Biden's comments come after he defeated President Donald Trump in a race in which mask-wearing became a political topic, with Biden urging Americans to follow public health experts' guidance and Trump refusing to do so -- holding rallies and White House events largely maskless attendees and downplaying their importance.

"It doesn't matter who you voted for; where you stood before Election Day," Biden said Monday. "It doesn't matter your party, your point of view. We could save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months

He called drug-maker Pfizer's Monday announcement that early data shows its coronavirus vaccine is more than 90% effective good news.

the pandemic is an "immense and growing" threat and that a "dark winter" is still likely, with the numbers of cases and deaths reaching new peaks in recent days.

Biden's transition team earlier Monday morning announced the group of public health experts that will make up his coronavirus advisory board, which includes Rick Bright, a whistleblower from the Trump administration

he was met with skepticism by Trump administration officials when he raised concerns in the early throes of the pandemic about critical supplies shortages, is a clear signal of the contrasted direction that Biden intends to take his administration

Revealing the members of the pandemic task force is the transition's first major announcement, highlighting how important the President-elect finds combating the deadly virus which has taken more than 230,000 lives in the United States. The announcement also comes as the nation nears 10 million cases, with over 9.9 million reported cases as of Sunday evening, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Both Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received a briefing from the transition coronavirus advisory board on Monday

Biden pledged repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would listen to the advice from scientists and public health experts about the pandemic if elected president and slammed Trump's handling of the virus

The first such battle Biden cited was that to control the virus.

It's reminiscent of the focus that Biden, and former President Barack Obama, devoted to the economy when they won the White House 12 years ago in the midst of a deep economic crisis.

Biden pledging to take the pandemic seriously, while Trump diminished the importance of the virus

"They don't have a massive eraser pen. They've got to go through the rule-making process," said Allison Orris, a former Obama administration official and counsel with Manatt Health, a professional services firm. "They are going to have to think about what comes first, second and third and be realistic about timing."

Plus, the Biden administration may opt to keep and continue several Trump administration efforts, including shifting to value-based care, rather than paying doctors for every visit and procedure, and increasing access to telehealth,

The two administrations also share common views on some measures to lower drug pricing, including basing Medicare payments on the cost of prescription medications in other countries and importing drugs from abroad. But Trump officials have not actually put these proposals in place.

While Trump focused on dismantling the Affordable Care Act, Biden will emphasize expanding the law and access to health coverage.

The Trump administration took the historic step in early 2018 of allowing states to require certain Medicaid recipients to work in order to receive benefits. Eight states have received approval, seven have pending requests and four had their waivers set aside in court, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Biden's Health and Human Services secretary would be able to unwind the approvals, but it is a complicated task, said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. The secretary would have to determine whether to withdraw permission for the entire waiver or just certain features.

Several of these waivers included other provisions that could make it harder for low-income Americans to retain Medicaid coverage, such as lockouts for non-payment of premiums.

One executive order Trump repeatedly points to is expanding short-term health plans, which typically have lower premiums, but provide less comprehensive coverage and don't have to adhere to the Affordable Care Act's protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

"The short-term plans have important symbolic significance because they restrict coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, which was a prominent political issue in the campaign," said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In its first year in office, the Trump administration slashed funds to promote Obamacare open enrollment and to assist consumers with selecting plans by 90% and 84%, respectively.

The Biden administration is expected to reverse all these measures to curtail Obamacare.

Biden has promised to revoke the Trump administration rule barring federally funded health care providers in the Title X family planning program from referring patients for abortions.

Biden has vowed to reverse the so-called Mexico City Policy, a ban on funding for foreign nonprofits that perform or promote abortions, which Trump reinstated and expanded during his tenure.

The Trump administration reinstated the measure -- which had previously impacted only family planning assistance -- in 2017 by presidential memorandum and extended it to all applicable US global health funding under the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance."

The Biden administration is also expected to reinstitute a directive that states cannot bar Medicaid funds from going to qualified providers that separately provide abortions, such as Planned Parenthood.

Trump also signed a bill in 2017 allowing states to withhold federal money from organizations that provide abortion services, including Planned Parenthood.

The Trump administration has been particularly hostile toward transgender Americans. Among its most criticized moves was an effort earlier this year to rollback an Obama-era regulation prohibiting discrimination in health care against patients who are transgender.

Biden's LGBTQ policy plan also says he will work to expand funding for mental health services for LGBTQ Americans and that his administration plans to automatically enroll low-income LGBTQ people in the public option, once it's created, if they live in rural areas in states that didn't expand Medicaid.

The president and Mr. Biden were at lecterns more than six feet apart at the debate. At that distance, Mr. Biden might have had protection from larger respiratory droplets released by the president, but not from aerosols lingering in the air.

Indoors, aerosols may travel farther than six feet. In August, for example, scientists reported that they had successfully isolated live virus from aerosols collected at a distance of seven feet and 16 feet from an infected patient in a hospital.

Dr. Marr likened the aerosols released while talking or shouting to cigarette smoke. People closest to the smoker — like Mr. Biden and the moderator, Chris Wallace (who plans to take a test on Monday) — would have been exposed first.

But over time, the smoke in a poorly ventilated room will drift throughout the space and reach even those much farther away.

The C.D.C. has not fully acknowledged the risk of airborne transmission of the virus indoors, beyond indirect nods to the importance of ventilation in schools and businesses.On Sept. 18, the C.D.C. published a new version of its guidance on how the virus spreads that acknowledged the importance of aerosols, and said inhalation of the virus was the main way the virus was transmitted.

The version posted Sept. 18 also said that indoors, “there is growing evidence that droplets and airborne particles can remain suspended in the air and be breathed in by others, and travel distances beyond 6 feet (for example, during choir practice, in restaurants, or in fitness classes).”

Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Biden's campaign, stressed to CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" Sunday morning that the former vice president's campaign has adhered to guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the onset of the pandemic earlier this year.

"We are adhering to CDC guidance, we are listening to the public health experts and we are taking every single precaution. Our staff are wearing masks and are social distancing everywhere -- on planes, in cars, inside events, outside events," Sanders said. "We're wearing the masks that are keeping us safe."

"I think that tells you a lot of what you need to know about how the Trump campaign has treated this from the outset," Bedingfield said.

"If I'm going to be spending time with the President or other team members, first of all we're tested beforehand. There's about a full hour space from the time that we're tested until we make sure that we're in the clear," Miller said. "We keep distance from the President at all times. The closest I ever get to the President is about eight feet, maybe six feet -- usually pretty solid distance back. A lot of times it's more like ten feet."

And we make sure that anyone has their temperature checked. People are washing hands, they're using hand sanitizer."

"What I can't speak to since I'm not part of White House operations, I'm not part of the White House medical unit, is the exact -- how much time he was spending with Hope and the proximity for these things. I can't speak to that.

Permission to use the additional portions means the limited supply could increase by up to 40%, Politico reported.

Leading health experts say that even if all goes well, the vaccine will not be available to the general public until the end of March or beginning of April.

Inoculations began in the U.S. on Monday with health care workers and the elderly being the first in line to get it.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that a second allotment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may not be available to the U.S. until next June, given the combination of short supply and global demand.

"It's pretty unusual to have a full extra dose or more though — but it does seem to be there!" Erin Fox, a pharmacist at University of Utah who monitors drug shortages, told the news outlet.

However, because there are no preservatives in the vaccines, partial doses from separate vials shouldn't be combined.

There are conflicting reports about when the U.S. is poised to receive another batch of the medicine from Pfizer.

A vaccine developed by Moderna is expected to get emergency use authorization from the FDA as early as this week. Clinical data shows it is nearly as effective as the Pfizer injections.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's senior official for infectious diseases, told NPR this week that half of all Americans would need to be vaccinated before seeing an impact on the spread of the virus, and that 75% to 85% of the population would need to be vaccinated to create herd immunity. He predicted the U.S. could begin to see early stages of herd immunity by late spring or summer.

Many of the plant's 2,800 employees are immigrants and refugees.

Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson visited the plant along with health officials in April. He told The New York Times that working conditions there — workers crowded elbow to elbow, not wearing face coverings — "shook me to the core."

It was around this time, according to a complaint from the family of one employee who died, that the manager of the Waterloo facility organized a "cash buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for COVID-19."

Tyson had employees move between a different Iowa plant where an outbreak was occurring and the Waterloo plant, and did not adequately test or quarantine them before they entered the Waterloo facility.

The lawsuit also alleges that supervisors outwardly denied there were cases of the virus at the Waterloo plant but began avoiding the plant floor because they were afraid of contracting the virus.

The complaint says Tyson offered $500 "thank you bonuses" to employees who showed up for every scheduled shift for three months — a policy that the plaintiffs argue incentivized sick workers to keep working.

"We're saddened by the loss of any Tyson team member and sympathize with their families. Our top priority is the health and safety of our workers, and we've implemented a host of protective measures at our facilities that meet or exceed CDC and OSHA guidance for preventing COVID-19," Mickelson said, pointing to investments the company has made in testing, temperature scanners, workspace dividers and other safety measures.

Tyson eventually announced on April 22 it would suspend operations at the plant. It reopened two weeks later.

years of painstakingly worded treaties, high-level visits and cutting-edge disease surveillance—all meant to encourage good-faith cooperation—have only bitten around the edges of the problem.

“It can’t demand entry into a country because they think something bad is happening.”

Nearly 200 countries were counting on an agency whose budget—roughly $2.4 billion in 2020—is less than a sixth of the Maryland Department of Health’s. Its donors, largely Western governments, earmark most of that money for causes other than pandemic preparedness.

In 2018 and 2019, about 8% of the WHO’s budget went to activities related to pandemic preparedness

the agency’s bureaucratic structure, diplomatic protocol and funding were no match for a pandemic as widespread and fast-moving as Covid-19.

To write its recommendations, the WHO solicits outside experts, which can be a slow process.

It took those experts more than four months to agree that widespread mask-wearing helps, and that people who are talking, shouting or singing can expel the virus through tiny particles that linger in the air. In that time, about half a million people died.

As months rolled on, it became clear that governments were reluctant to allow the U.N. to scold, shame or investigate them.

In particular, The Wall Street Journal found:

* China appears to have violated international law requiring governments to swiftly inform the WHO and keep it in the loop about an alarming infectious-disease cluster

—there are no clear consequences for violations

* The WHO lost a critical week waiting for an advisory panel to recommend a global public-health emergency, because some of its members were overly hopeful that the new disease wasn’t easily transmissible from one person to another.

* The institution overestimated how prepared some wealthy countries were, while focusing on developing countries, where much of its ordinary assistance is directed

Public-health leaders say the WHO plays a critical role in global health, leading responses to epidemics and setting health policies and standards for the world. It coordinates a multinational effort every year to pick the exact strains that go into the seasonal flu vaccine, and has provided public guidance and advice on Covid-19 when many governments were silent.

The world’s public-health agency was born weak, created in 1948 over U.S. and U.K. reluctance. For decades, it was legally barred from responding to diseases that it learned about from the news. Countries were required to report outbreaks of only four diseases to the WHO: yellow fever, plague, cholera and smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980.

Nearly three times that amount was budgeted for eradicating polio, a top priority for the WHO’s two largest contributors: the U.S. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

SARS convinced governments to retool the WHO. The next year, delegates arrived in the Geneva palace where the League of Nations once met to resolve a centuries-old paradox: Countries don’t report outbreaks, because they fear—correctly—their neighbors will respond by blocking travel and trade.

“Everybody pushed back. No sovereign country wants to have this.”

China wanted an exemption from immediately reporting SARS outbreaks. The U.S. argued it couldn’t compel its 50 states to cooperate with the treaty. Iran blocked American proposals to make the WHO focus on bioterrorism. Cuba had an hourslong list of objections.

Around 3:15 a.m. on the last day, exhausted delegates ran out of time. The treaty they approved, called the International Health Regulations, imagined that each country would quickly and honestly report, then contain, any alarming outbreaks

In return, the treaty discouraged restrictions on travel and trade. There would be no consequences for reporting an outbreak—yet no way to punish a country for hiding one.

The treaty’s key chokepoint: Before declaring a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, the WHO’s director-general would consult a multinational emergency committee and give the country in question a chance to argue against such a declaration.

Delegates agreed this could give some future virus a head start but decided it was more important to discourage the WHO from making any unilateral announcements that could hurt their economies.

On Jan. 22, a committee of 15 scientists haggled for hours over Chinese data and a handful of cases in other countries. Clearly, the virus was spreading between people in China, though there was no evidence of that in other countries. The question now: Was it mainly spreading from very sick people in hospitals and homes—or more widely?

On Jan. 3, representatives of China’s National Health Commission arrived at the WHO office in Beijing. The NHC acknowledged a cluster of pneumonia cases, but didn’t confirm that the new pathogen was a coronavirus, a fact Chinese officials already knew.

That same day, the NHC issued an internal notice ordering laboratories to hand over or destroy testing samples and forbade anyone from publishing unauthorized research on the virus.

China’s failure to notify the WHO of the cluster of illnesses is a violation of the International Health Regulations

China also flouted the IHR by not disclosing all key information it had to the WHO

The WHO said it’s up to member states to decide whether a country has complied with international health law, and that the coming review will address those issues.

While Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome and posted it publicly, the government was less forthcoming about how patients might be catching the virus.

WHO scientists pored over data they did get, and consulted with experts from national health agencies, including the CDC, which has 33 staff detailed to the WHO.

Then a 61-year-old woman was hospitalized in Thailand on Jan. 13.

The next day, Dr. van Kerkhove told reporters: “It’s certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission.” MERS and SARS, both coronaviruses, were transmissible among people in close quarters. Epidemiological investigations were under way, she said.

Over the next few years, emergency committees struggled over how to determine whether an outbreak was a PHEIC. It took months to declare emergencies for two deadly Ebola epidemics

The committee met over two days, but was split. They mostly agreed on one point: The information from China “was a little too imprecise to very clearly state that it was time” to recommend an emergency declaration,

On Jan. 28, Dr. Tedros and the WHO team arrived for their meeting with Mr. Xi

Leaning across three wooden coffee tables, Dr. Tedros pressed for cooperation. In the absence of information, countries might react out of fear and restrict travel to China, he repeated several times throughout the trip. Mr. Xi agreed to allow a WHO-led international team of experts to visit. It took until mid-February to make arrangements and get the team there.

China also agreed to provide more data, and Dr. Tedros departed, leaving Dr. Briand behind with a list of mysteries to solve. How contagious was the virus? How much were children or pregnant women at risk? How were cases linked? This was vital information needed to assess the global risk, Dr. Briand said

Back in Geneva, Dr. Tedros reconvened the emergency committee. By now it was clear there was human-to-human transmission in other countries. When it met on Jan. 30, the committee got the information the WHO had been seeking. This time the committee recommended and Dr. Tedros declared a global public-health emergency.

President Trump and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo both assured constituents their health systems would perform well. The U.K.’s chief medical officer described the WHO’s advice as largely directed at poor and middle-income countries. As for keeping borders open, by then many governments had already closed them to visitors from China.

The WHO shifted focus to the developing world, where it believed Covid-19 would exact the heaviest toll. To its surprise, cases shot up just across the border, in northern Italy.

Lessons learned

If there were one thing the WHO might have done differently, it would be to offer wealthier countries the type of assistance with public-health interventions that the WHO provides the developing world

the WHO’s warning system of declaring a global public-health emergency needs to change. Some want to see a warning system more like a traffic light—with color-coded alarms for outbreaks, based on how worried the public should be

Emergency committees need clearer criteria for declaring a global public-health emergency and should publicly explain their thinking

The WHO should have more powers to intervene in countries to head off a health crisis

the WHO’s health emergencies unit should report to the director-general and not member states, and its budget should be protected so it doesn’t have to compete with other programs for money.

Implementing many of those ideas would require herding diplomats back for another monthslong slog of treaty revisions. If and when such talks begin, new governments will likely be in place, and political priorities will float elsewher

“Unfortunately, I’m very cynical about this,” he said. “We are living through cycles of panic and neglect. We’ve been through all of this before.”

Christian vaccine refusal not only rejects self-care, it enhances risks to innocent and vulnerable neighbors. Even vaccinated people can catch relatively rare breakthrough cases. And every person—regardless of vaccination status—is vulnerable to the strains placed on a region’s hospitals when COVID runs rampant. 

As a person created in the image of God, taking care of yourself is an independent good. Taking care of yourself so that you can care for others is an even nobler good. 

The balance is clear. It is incumbent on the Christian to take care of themselves, including by taking medicine “in order not to become contaminated” (a nice definition of a vaccine before vaccines were invented). To the extent that he or she takes risks, those risks should be on behalf of others

I also fear that the relentless right-wing political focus on religious liberty has obscured two realities—that our liberties have limits when they collide with the rights of others, and that the exercise of our liberty carries with it profound moral responsibility. 

The idea that liberty has limits is inherent in the American social compact

Through more than two centuries of controversy and progress, our classical liberal legal system is learning to harmonize these three unalienable rights.

I have liberty, yes, but my liberty does not extend to taking or endangering your life

In addition, my liberty doesn’t extend to materially impairing your ability to pursue happiness.

In more prosaic legal terms, the state is able to regulate even the strongest of liberties when it possesses a “compelling governmental interest” and places those regulations in proper limits

Foremost among them are protections for life and health.

By contrast, what does the anti-vax Christian seek? The liberty to risk both the lives of others (through the physical danger of COVID and/or the danger of swamped medical facilities) and their pursuit of happiness (through the continued physical, economic, and social strains of a pandemic extended in part but the choices of anti-vax citizens). 

let’s be honest and clear. The majority of Christians seeking religious exemptions are using religion as a mere pretext for their real concern—be it fear of the shot or the simple desire to do what they want.

I’m quite concerned that long-standing, justified Christian concerns for religious liberty have inadvertently created a sense of religious entitlement that obscures the desperate need for religious responsibility.

For the Christian believer, the pursuit of freedom is inseparable from the pursuit of virtue. We do not seek liberty simply to satisfy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pursue the freedom to make our neighbors sick, we violate the social compact and undermine our moral standing in politics, law, and culture. Christian libertinism becomes a long-term threat to religious liberty itself. 

Our founders recognized the threat of libertinism to liberty. “Our Constitution,” John Adams wrote, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” In fact, a sufficient degree of vice would, Adams argued, “break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

it is increasingly clear that many of the remaining holdouts need their hearts to change before their minds will change. It’s their moral framework that’s broken, and when that framework is broken, reason and virtue have difficulty penetrating a hardened heart.

The proper framework is easy to articulate, yet hard to create. Take prudent measures to protect yourself. When you choose to take risks, take risks for others. And always recognize that liberty isn’t license. Believers should seek freedom to pursue virtue, not to indulge their desires or appease their fears. 

In March I wrote to warn that Christian vaccine hesitancy was a looming national problem. That which we have feared has come to pass. Indeed, as both the geographic concentrations of unvaxxed Americans and the survey data demonstrate, Christian vaccine refusal is helping sustain this pandemic:

Now is the time to take a clear stand. Not in a way that mocks or condescends, but one can be firm while also being respectful. As the Apostle Paul told Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.” The power is not political power, but the power of God over the fears of man. The love is for God and for our neighbor. And sound judgment should help us separate lies from truth and tell us that no argument for liberty should trump our responsibility to spare our nation and our neighbors and finally take the vaccine. 

“Based on our research, I can’t see evidence that we can reach 1.9C,” he said. “But whether we are now on course for 1.9C or 2.7C, the main point is that we should focus on concrete action.”

China has released five documents detailing plans to achieve its dual goals of peaking carbon emissions in 2030 and reaching net zero by 2060. “If you read those reports you can find all of our actions, but nobody reads everything,”

As an example, he said the working guidance document on carbon peaking and neutrality outlined a strict control on the increase of coal consumption during the 14th five-year period and then a gradual reduction during the following five years. “That means China will peak coal consumption around 2025, though that is not a line you will see in the document. You need to interpret it and nobody [outside China] can do that.”

Similarly, he said the government 1+N policy system provided a roadmap of 37 tasks that the country needed to take until 2060 on areas ranging from legislation and policy to technology and finance

There will be another 30 documents published in the coming year that break down actions needed in key sectors, such as building and transport, as well as major industries including steel and chemicals. “No country has issued so many documents to support its targets,” he said. “It’s a holistic solution, but nobody knows.”

China’s two different targets pose very different challenges, he said. “The peaking issue is easy. More difficult is how to achieve neutrality … We are in transition. Our concern in the future is not that China is too slow, but that it is too fast.”

“Our coal-fired plants have a life of 10 to 12 years. If we shut them down, who will pay for the stranded assets? Who will employ the laid-off workers?”

By the end of this decade, the government plans to reach 1200GW of wind and solar power, which would exceed the entire installed electricity capacity of the US, he said.

As at previous Cops, China will also push wealthy nations to make greater financial contributions to developing countries, which have done least to cause the climate crisis but suffer most from its consequences.

“China would like more effort on supporting developing countries,” he said. “If we are going to aim for 1.5C instead of 2C, then there has to be an increase in the funds available to make that happen.”

“1.5C is possible, but it would carry a cost, social and economic. If we cannot solve these problems equally, especially for developing countries, then it is not a real target.”

“We are all in the same boat, but different cabins,” he said. “Some live in a big space and eat too much. We need balance.”

Grassroots movements don’t have a great track record, he wrote. “

Some marchers went into party politics: One participant from Maine—a woman who’d never done anything political but vote before attending the Women’s March—went home and became the chair of the Maine Democratic Party. Only a fraction of the marchers kept taking their cues from the Women’s March organization itself. And that makes sense: The Women’s March encompassed an almost unbelievably broad array of concerns.

Some did run for office, and some won. The march itself encompassed a diverse coalition of interest groups and the convention that followed, in October 2017, hosted workshops on the messier aspects of political organizing.

The members of that group threw themselves into the fight against partisan gerrymandering and worked to pass a state ballot initiative for an independent redistricting commission. Now, the Michigan maps have been redrawn. Though it’s impossible to measure how much the Women’s March contributed to that outcome, it unquestionably played a part.

Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics.”

But the organizers of Women’s March didn’t get that memo. The nonprofit that grew around it treated its four leaders — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Bob Bland, and Linda Sarsour — as celebrities, the visionary trailblazers at the head of a cohesive political movement.

Organizers of marches are rarely given such disproportionate credit for their events’ success. Seasoned activists know that power of a grassroots movement lies not in its branding or executive leadership structure, but in the people who show up and sustain it. And yet, the Women’s March foursome quickly claimed to speak for something far more decentralized and organic than their own narrative would suggest.

They were everywhere: at fashion shows, cutting in front of rank-and-file participants at events, on magazine covers that they complained were not distributed widely enough. They accepted awards, posed for glamorous photo shoots, and fought a two-year battle to trademark the phrase “women’s march,” which they eventually dropped.

But the Women’s March organization didn’t do much to refocus all that attention on the thousands of local organizers and millions of marchers who gave the march its meaning.

So when Mallory and Perez drew criticism for their support of noted sexist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, it was no big stretch for critics to use the leaders of the Women’s March to smear the entire movement.

The groundswell of women looking for community and purpose after Trump’s election needed some guidance—literally, marching orders. They did not need a clique of unelected spokespeople.

They had come to the Women’s March not as a unified people following a leader with a specific set of demands, but as individuals with a variety of related grievances, wanting to express a broad feeling of dismay at the direction the country was headed.

Many of them were inspired to undertake a deeper political education and find their place in other movements, including the fight to save the Affordable Care Act and the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020. In an alternate timeline, with no Women’s March to warm them up, would many of the white people at those Black Lives Matter marches have shown up at all?

The most memorable subsequent actions of the Women’s March—the groups that traveled to D.C. to beg their senators not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the marches in the streets to protest the end of Roe v. Wade in Texas—what did they accomplish?

Protests and marches reassure people that they’re neither alone in their anger or fear, nor crazy for being angry and fearful. They introduce demonstrators to new friends and networks of political activity. There’s nothing like the rush of standing in a chanting crowd, sweating or shivering with thousands of people who share one’s outrage, to revive flagging willpower.

I’m sure there are plenty of Women’s Marchers who heaved a sigh of relief and went “back to brunch” after Joe Biden took office, thinking the work was done. But I don’t think that’s the prevailing view among the people who first woke up to politics when Trump became president. They watched, as we all did, as right-wing rioters took the Capitol last Jan. 6. They’re witnessing the dissolution of a broad voting rights bill at the hands of two Democratic senators. They’re watching abortion rights disintegrate in Texas and across the South. And they’re living through the hottest years in recorded history, bracing for the next hurricane or forest fire, as the people with the power to save life on Earth as we know it look the other way.

In this moment, under those conditions, with five years of hindsight, the Women’s March looks nothing short of revolutionary.

Moderna’s booster will be half the dose that’s used for the first two shots, based on company data showing that was plenty to rev up immunity again.

For J&J’s single-shot vaccine, the FDA said all U.S. recipients, no matter their age, could get a second dose at least two months following their initial vaccination.

As for mixing and matching, the FDA said it’s OK to use any brand for the booster regardless of which vaccination people got first.

FDA officials said they wanted to make the booster guidance as flexible as possible, given that many people don’t remember which brand of vaccine they received.

“Being able to interchange these vaccines is a good thing — it’s like what we do with flu vaccines,” FDA’s Dr. Peter Marks told reporters Wednesday evening.

That study also showed recipients of the single-dose J&J vaccination had a far bigger response if they got a full-strength Moderna booster or a Pfizer booster rather than a second J&J shot. The study didn’t test the half-dose Moderna booster.

FDA recommended that everyone who’d gotten the single-shot J&J vaccine get a booster since it has consistently shown lower protection than its two-shot rivals.

Some warn that the U.S. government hasn’t clearly articulated the goals of boosters given that the shots continue to head off the worst effects of COVID-19

FDA regulators said they would move quickly to expand boosters to lower age groups, such as people in their 40s and 50s, if warranted.

The vast majority of the nearly 190 million Americans who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have received the Pfizer or Moderna options, while about 15 million have received the J&J vaccine.