Group items tagged

The CDC said the number of people missing doses — 5 million — may not be exact. If a person got the two doses from different reporting entities — for example, first from a state-run clinic and then from a local health clinic — the two doses may not have been linked by databases, a CDC spokeswoman said.

Several people have reported that they got their second shot at a different place than their first, and administrators at the first site contacted them repeatedly about making an appointment for a second shot, which had already been administered elsewhere.

But some people are certainly missing their second dose

When Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, got his second shot, "it was on a day that was horribly inconvenient, and I tried to move it around. They're like: You got to show up on this day at this time," he said.

The authors analyzed results from a survey of 1,027 US adults taken between February 11 and 15 through a panel created by the National Opinion Research Center.

Within the St. Luke's University Hospital Network in Pennsylvania, the success rate in getting people fully vaccinated is at 99%, said Dr. Jeffrey Jahre, an infectious diseases expert there, in part because the network made it easy to get the second appointment, assigning it when the first shot was given.

The network then followed up with multiple reminders of the appointment -- five days out, three days out and then the day before -- and those who were unable to keep that appointment were "given an easy methodology of changing it," Jahre said.

"My sense is, a lot of this is, it's hard to get. People miss appointments, people miss doctor's appointments," Jha said on a teleconference with reporters Tuesday.

But another reason people may be skipping the second dose is not understanding the importance of it or being misinformed. And that may be harder to fix.

Some people skip the second shot because they think the first one offers them sufficient protection

More than 43% of the US population has had at least one shot of a vaccine, and 30% are fully vaccinated,

About 20% of those surveyed believed the vaccines gave recipients strong protection after the first dose, and another 36% were unsure.Just 44% of vaccinated people reported that the vaccines conferred "strong protection" one to two weeks after the second dose, as the CDC guidelines state.

Earlier this year, there was a public debate among health officials about delaying second doses to focus on building partial immunity to a larger swath of the population before giving everyone the second dose.

In fact, the first dose just "primes the immune system, then the second shot sort of boosts it. This makes it a better option for obtaining immunity,"

"There's a 36-fold difference of getting fully vaccinated versus partially," Dr. Anthony Fauci said at a news briefing Friday.

And then there's the question of whether the country can obtain herd immunity -- meaning 70% to 85% of the population is immune -- if the number of people who don't get a second vaccine dose keeps rising.

People also need to know, according to Wen and others, is that if you are among the 8% who have gotten only one shot of Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, it may not be too late to get that second shot.

“We are in uncharted territory in terms of trade policy,” said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics. “What President Trump has done is make everything uncertain in trade policy. You don’t know on almost a day-to-day basis what trade policy is going to be and businesses find it very difficult to operate in that kind of environment.”

Ross said in an interview with The Washington Post that Trump was acting within his authority. He said that under Section 232 of a key U.S. trade law Trump “has very broad powers. He can raise the tariffs. He can lower them. He can let countries in and let them out.”

She’s not sure what should happen in Syria or when, saying that Americans have to trust the leaders they elected to make such decisions.

He had joined other military officers in demanding the resignation of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, and was forced into hiding. He eventually slipped across the border into Colombia and got a plane ticket to Miami. He thought his training with the U.S. military would help him when he arrived.

Colina discussed U.S. policy as he sat in El Arepazo, a bustling restaurant connected to a Doral gas station that serves Venezuelan comfort food. He is grateful that Trump has placed heavy sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — but he hopes Trump will also establish an oil embargo, challenge Maduro’s authority and make it easier for refugees like him to move to the United States.

“I don’t think Haitian immigrants should be rejected if they’re trying to get to this country,” said Brown, 51, a longtime community organizer in Chicago who votes for Democrats but doesn’t think the party does enough for African Americans. “I think that our immigration policy should be humane.”

A high vaccination rate was especially important in Florida, which trails only Maine in the share of residents 65 and older. By the end of July, Florida had vaccinated about 60 percent of adults, just shy of the national average

Had it reached a vaccination rate of 74 percent — the average for five New England states at the time — it could have prevented more than 16,000 deaths and more than 61,000 hospitalizations that summer, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.

in Florida, unlike the nation as a whole — and states like New York and California that Mr. DeSantis likes to single out — most people who died from Covid died after vaccines became available to all adults, not before.

Mr. DeSantis and his aides have said that his opposition was to mandates, not to the vaccinations themselves. They say the governor only questioned the efficacy of the shots once it became evident that they did not necessarily prevent infection — which prompted him to criticize experts and the federal government.

The governor had early success in following his instincts. In 2020, the state supplied its nearly 4,000 long-term care homes with Covid tests and isolated Covid patients, avoiding New York’s mistake of releasing Covid patients from hospitals to nursing homes where they infected others. Florida’s death rate in the pandemic’s first year, adjusted for age, was lower than all but 10 other states’.

Florida was also one of only four states to require schools to hold in-person classes in the fall of 2020, a move that Mr. DeSantis has said defied the nation’s public health experts

In fact, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a federal infectious disease expert on former President Donald J. Trump’s task force, said repeatedly that summer and fall that schools could open safely with the right precautions. Nonetheless, facing strong opposition from teachers’ unions, nearly three-fourths of the nation’s 100 largest school districts offered only remote learning that fall.

At the same time, though, the governor was embracing more extreme views, including those of Dr. Scott W. Atla

Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya argued that people who were not at risk of severe consequences should not face Covid restrictions. If they were infected, they would develop natural immunity, which would eventually build up in the population and cause the virus to fade away, they said.

Many public health experts were alarmed by this strategy, which was articulated in a document known as the Great Barrington Declaration. They said it would be impossible to ring-fence the vulnerable, or even to clearly communicate to the public who they were. Besides older Americans, as many as 41 million younger adults were considered to be at high risk of severe disease if infected because of underlying medical conditions like obesity.

Dr. Atlas, however, argued that the virus was not dangerous to an overwhelming majority of Americans. Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya said the Covid death rate for everyone under 70 was very low. Dr. Atlas claimed that children had “virtually zero” risk of death.

As of this summer, more than 345,000 Americans under 70 have died of the virus, and more than 3.5 million have been hospitalized

The disease has killed nearly 2,300 children and adolescents, and nearly 200,000 have been hospitalized.

Mr. DeSantis gave him a platform at a series of public events in Florida at the end of the summer of 2020. He would go on to echo Dr. Atlas’s views, sometimes in modified form, throughout the pandemic.

Mr. DeSantis subsequently promoted the shots in 27 counties. Florida offered the vaccine to everyone 65 and older, an eligibility system simpler than an early one recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and adopted by many states, that prioritized essential workers and those over 75.

But his enthusiasm for shots waned fast, tracking the growing hostility toward them among the party’s conservative activists. In late February, when Mr. DeSantis hosted a gathering of such activists for the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, he boasted that Florida was an “oasis of freedom” in a nation led by misguided health authorities.

By the time all adults became eligible for the vaccines in April of that year, Mr. DeSantis was rarely promoting them.

“Some are choosing not to take it, which is fine,” he said in March, at a 100-minute public event on Covid in which he did not once urge people to get vaccinated. In dozens of appearances on Fox News in the first half of 2021, he was carefully neutral about shots, except for those over 65.

“Younger people are just simply at very little risk for this,”

A few months later, he told Fox News that he had concluded early on that Covid “was something that was risky for elderly people,” but that it posed minimal risks for people “who were in reasonably good health, who were, say, under 50.”

The data-driven governor also turned away from Covid case data.

In May 2021, Florida closed its 27 state-run testing centers. The next month, on orders from the governor’s office, the Health Department halted daily reports on infections and deaths, switching to weekly reports that drew less attention.

Both polls and political events showed that Republicans were not as excited as Democrats about the shots. At an Alabama political rally that August, Mr. Trump recommended the vaccine — and was booed. When a reporter asked Mr. DeSantis later that year if he had gotten a booster shot, he responded that he had gotten “the normal shot.”

After the highly contagious Delta variant began spreading in Florida that summer, Mr. DeSantis insisted that his approach had worked. Younger adults were driving the surge but “they’re not getting really sick from it or anything,” he said, adding: “They will develop immunity as a result of those infections.”

But they were getting sick. And vaccinations, which Mr. DeSantis suddenly began recommending again in late July, took weeks to confer protection

With hospitalizations rising, he began a campaign to offer monoclonal antibody treatments — a triage response to the pandemic’s frightening resurgence.

The drug cost vastly more than shots and required more medical staff to administer. Within about six weeks, the state had administered more than 90,000 treatments and probably kept 5,000 people out of the hospital, Dr. Rivkees said.

Mr. DeSantis accused the media in early August of “lying” about Covid patients’ flooding hospitals. Two weeks later, Mary C. Mayhew, head of the Florida Hospital Association, said: “There can be no question that many Florida hospitals are stretched to their absolute limits.”

“Our patients are younger and sicker,” Mr. Smith wrote. Of 17 patients on ventilators in intensive care on Aug. 13, 2021, more than half were younger than 55. Only one was vaccinated.

“People say that the decision about vaccination is a personal one and it doesn’t affect anyone else,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Tell that to the kids who lost their mom.”

When shots became available last year for children under 5, Florida did not preorder them because, Mr. DeSantis said, he did not consider them “appropriate.” Florida’s vaccination rates are well below the national average for children under 5. The state also trails in booster shots.

After Dr. Ladapo issued misleading claims about the risks of Covid shots for young men, the heads of the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration sent a scathing four-page rebuttal. Such misinformation “puts people at risk of death or serious illness,” they said.

While the pandemic waned, leaving more than 80,000 Floridians and 1.13 million Americans dead, the governor continued to push policies that kept him at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine and anti-mandate conversation. A new state law, signed by Mr. DeSantis in May, bans government agencies, businesses and schools from requiring Covid testing, vaccination or mask wearing.

“Everything involving Covid — I think there needs to be major, major accountability,” he said in Iowa this month. “Because if there’s not, if you don’t have a reckoning, they are going to do it again.”

Despite mounting anticipation for the decision, the percentage of parents who will get their young children vaccinated is likely to be low compared to other age groups. A survey from February found that 31% of parents of children in the age range will get their kid vaccinated right away if a vaccine is authorized.

The decision has to come this month “because of the time required for manufacturing the necessary doses,” three of FDA’s top officials – FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, vaccine expert Peter Marks and principal deputy commissioner Janet Woodcock – wrote in a paper published by the journal JAMA in May.Both Pfizer and Moderna are studying vaccines designed to combat omicron and other strains. However, data on the shots remains scarce.

Clinical data from Moderna’s shot is expected this month, according to the company. Moderna in April released findings to support its booster shot development strategy, but the data comes after research in animals suggested the omicron-specific shot might not provide additional protection. A study from scientists at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s Vaccine Research Center found that primates boosted with the original vaccine had similar levels of protection as monkeys who got an omicro

The Biden administration has warned of potential fall and winter surges infecting up to 100 million Americans as it gears up for a fall booster shot campaign, whether that is with an omicron-specific shot or not. The FDA authorized a fourth vaccine dose for people ages 50 and older in March, and expanding the shot to more age groups is under consideration.“Administering additional COVID-19 vaccine doses to appropriate individuals this fall around the time of the usual influenza vaccine campaign has the potential to protect susceptible individuals against hospitalization and death, and therefore will be a topic for FDA consideration,” the officials wrote.In fact, the officials said that coronavirus booster shots could be on their way to becoming a yearly occurrence.

It is time to “accept that the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is the new normal,” according to the officials.“It will likely circulate globally for the foreseeable future, taking its place alongside other common respiratory viruses such as influenza,” they wrote.But paying for the shots remains an issue for the Biden administration as Congress shows little appetite for approving more COVID-19 funding.

He has insisted that the 12 jurors were given “all of the evidence” and were free to pursue additional charges.

As is customary in the recording of Grand Jury proceedings, juror deliberations and prosecutor recommendations and statements were not recorded, as they are not evidence,

The audio files do not include statements or recommendations from prosecutors about which charges they think should be brought against the officers. Mr. Cameron has said that jurors were told that the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor were justified in their actions. Ultimately, the jurors indicted a former officer last week on three charges of endangering Ms. Taylor’s neighbors by firing into their home during a raid of her apartment in March, but did not charge either of the officers who shot her.

Mr. Hankison’s rounds did not hit anyone, investigators have said, but some of them flew into an apartment behind Ms. Taylor’s, leading to the three charges.

grand jurors indicted Brett Hankison, a former detective, on three counts of “wanton endangerment” last week, saying Mr. Hankison had recklessly fired his gun during the raid after Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend — who has said he thought intruders were entering the apartment — shot an officer in the leg.

Grand jurors are given broad powers to request evidence, call witnesses and determine which charges to pursue, but prosecutors often closely guide the jurors, presenting them with certain charges and telling them about their own roles. The process almost always remains secret.

Detective Myles Cosgrove, who the F.B.I. said fired the shot that killed Ms. Taylor, described a disorienting scene of flashing lights as officers breached the door and seemed to suggest uncertainty about exactly what happened.

But, he added, “It’s like a surreal thing. If you told me I didn’t do something at that time, I’d believe you. If you told me I did do something, I’d probably believe you, too.”

Detective Cosgrove said he also saw a shadow of a person, a “larger than normal human shadow,” when they raided the apartment and he saw flashing lights.

The first witness was an investigator for the Attorney General’s office, who presented photos and videos of the scene, including the body camera videos of three officers who arrived after the shots were fired

Grand jurors asked whether Kenneth Walker, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, had been named in the search warrant (he had not), what exactly the officers saw when the apartment door opened, and whether the officers executing the warrant were aware that the police had already found Jamarcus Glover, who was the target of an illegal drug investigation.

Mr. Glover was Ms. Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, and he was in custody by the time they raided her apartment. At times, the jurors’ questions suggested they were skeptical of what they were being shown: one asked about the time stamps on the video. Another asked why they had not seen the room where the gun was found; the investigator said that would be shown in a different video.

The unidentified neighbor yelled at them, “something about leave her alone, there was some girl there,” Detective Cosgrove said in an interview with police investigators last month that was played for the grand jury.

Grand jurors heard at least two Louisville police officers who were at the raid on Ms. Taylor’s apartment say the group knocked and announced their presence several times before breaking down the door, according to a recording of the proceedings released on Friday.Those accounts, which have been questioned by several of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors and her boyfriend, were included among roughly 15 hours of audio filed by the attorney general on Friday, which includes interviews heard by the grand jury over several days last week.

He said officers were outside knocking for 90 seconds, and that the volume escalated from “gentle knocking” to “forceful pounding” to pounding while yelling “police.”

Detective Nobles, who held the battering ram that broke through Ms. Taylor’s door, said he stood at the door, knocking and announcing himself as police for one or two minutes before he used the battering ram to force his way into Ms. Taylor’s apartment. His interview was also played for grand jurors. He said it took three knocks with the battering ram to break down the door completely.The first blow hit the handle, he said. The second broke the door, but left it still on the hinges. The third broke down the door completely. When he entered, Mr. Nobles said it was “pitch black,” and that Sgt. John Mattingly, one of the officers who shot Ms. Taylor, was quickly shot in the leg after the team entered the building.

In previous interviews with The Times, 11 of 12 of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors said they never heard the police identify themselves. One neighbor said he heard the group say “Police,” just once.

Grand jurors were played recordings of radio calls from Mr. Hankison, the detective who fired blindly from outside the apartment and has been charged with wanton endangerment, as well as 911 calls that came in after the shooting began.

The calls suggest that Mr. Hankison, who was fired after the shooting for violating department procedure, believed that Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly had been wounded by someone with an “A.R.” who was “barricaded” inside the apartment. Mr. Hankison’s reference to an “A.R.” on the call appears to be a reference to either an assault rile or the AR-15, a type of a military-style semiautomatic rifle.

The only charges brought by the grand jury were three counts of “wanton endangerment in the first degree” against Mr. Hankison for his actions during the raid.

Under Kentucky law, a person commits that crime when he or she “wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person,” and does so “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” Other states may use terms like “reckless endangerment” for an equivalent offense.

But the charges against Mr. Hankison are not for killing Ms. Taylor. None of the 10 shots he fired are known to have struck her. Instead, the Kentucky attorney general said the former detective was charged by the grand jury because the shots he fired had passed through Ms. Taylor’s apartment walls into a neighboring apartment, endangering three people there.

The crime is a Class D felony in Kentucky, which means it can carry a sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine on conviction for each count.

A person can be guilty of wanton endangerment even if they did not intend to harm anyone or to commit a crime; it is sufficient to recklessly disregard the peril that one’s actions create.

Mr. Hankison was fired from the force. During the raid, he fired into her apartment from outside, through a sliding glass patio door and a window that were covered with blinds, in violation of a department policy that requires officers to have a line of sight.

The name Breonna Taylor has echoed across the nation for months as demonstrators demanded the police be held accountable for her death.

The police killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died in May after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee, brought renewed attention to deadly episodes involving the police, including Ms. Taylor’s death, and fueled Black Lives Matter protests that persisted throughout the summer.

In September, when the grand jury announced no charges against the officers who killed Ms. Taylor, protesters poured into the streets of Louisville with renewed strength and anger, demanding stronger charges. The protesters called for all three officers, who are white, to be held to account for Ms. Taylor’s death. Ms. Taylor’s family, too, has pleaded for justice, pushing for criminal charges against the officers. Ms. Taylor’s case has also been the center of campaigns from several celebrities and athletes, some of whom have dedicated their seasons to keeping a spotlight on her case.

And while there’s no reason to suspect that a third dose would be particularly unsafe in healthy people, the FDA hasn’t explicitly declared it safe.

How exactly you get your booster shot matters too. Say you don’t qualify for an extra shot and one falls into your lap anyway. Taking it isn’t necessarily a moral error as long as you’re truthful, Faith Fletcher, an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, told me. But lying about your health or vaccine status is strictly out, she said, because it undermines the rules and guidelines that public-health officials design “to really maximize the greatest good among the greatest amount of people.”

The real moral failure, Fletcher said, is a systemic one: the fact that shots are falling into the laps of the healthy and vaccinated, rather than programs that bring vaccines to essential workers at their jobs, or to Black Americans at barber shops and stylists, or to walk-up and mobile clinics that can reach people who don’t have internet access.

When I reached out to Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid, representatives from all three pharmacy chains insisted that their stores are following the rules, but acknowledged that they’re relying on customers to tell the truth.

Asking patients to do anything more in order to get the vaccine would be a mistake, Jason Schwartz, a vaccine-policy expert at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. “It’s far more important to get folks vaccinated and to take down barriers that could keep folks who want to get vaccinated from getting [their shots], even if it means that some folks may be playing fast and loose with their own eligibility,” he said.

​​lying (overtly or by omission) to get a third dose can mess up the data on how well third shots are performing among the immunocompromised and how well a two-dose regimen is protecting those with healthy immune systems.

On an even more basic level, under-the-table boosting could skew data on national vaccination rates, making public-health authorities think more people have gotten their first or second shots than is actually the case. Essentially, getting a third shot before the CDC’s go-ahead can make it harder for health officials to determine when and if everyone else will really need them.

You can understand why the booster bandits have done what they’ve done: Getting another shot offers a sense of safety and control, however fleeting. After 18 months of pandemic life, it’s hard to begrudge anyone that. But the rule-breaking and the lying could help keep us all from really getting the virus under control for that much longer.

Michael Bloomberg in unveiling his recently announced $500 million Beyond Carbon campaign.

“It is time for all of us to accept that climate change is the challenge of our time.” He concluded, “It may be a moon shot — but it’s the only shot we’ve got.”

In 1970, Dr. Logsdon wrote a book, “The Decision to Go to the Moon,” that laid out four conditions that made Apollo possible

it has to be “a singular act that would force action, that you couldn’t ignore.”

leaders in a position to direct the resources necessary to meet the goal on “a warlike basis,” with very deep national pockets

“the objective has to be technically feasible.”

What would be the “action-forcing stimulus” for a climate moon shot, he asked? He suggested it would have to be something deeply dramatic and immediate, like “Manhattan going under water.”

“Apollo did not require changing human behavior” as fighting climate change would, through the need for measures like carbon taxes or changes in consumption patterns.

One more important difference between sending people to the moon and solving a problem like climate change was cited in a recent editorial in the journal Nature, which noted that attempts to counter climate change have lobbyists fighting against them

“Just because a metaphor is not exact,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not useful.”

The deceptively simple goal, he said, should be to “decarbonize electricity, and then electrify everything.”

mostly, he said, it will require a shift in national attitude.“The moon shot technology we need is political will.”

That would involve building up renewable energy and dropping electrical generation from fossil fuel plants, and building up the use of technologies like heat pumps that can make home heating and cooling more efficient

Could a “moon shot” for climate change cool a warming planet?

But President Kennedy did not have to convince people that the moon existed

"We are not in favour of tension," Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying after the incident."We have always been in favour of overcoming tensions through dialogue rather than conflict."

"We were not aware that they had fired shots at us," Muzaffer Gecici said. "We have video footage and we have handed this to the coastguard. We didn't even know it was a Russian ship."

And last week, Turkey complained over what it said was a sailor on a Russian naval ship brandishing a missile launcher as the vessel passed through Istanbul. R

ussia rejected the criticism, saying the crew had a "legal right" to protect the ship.

A Turkish F-16 fighter jet shoots down a Russian Su-24 attack aircraft, allegedly because it violated Turkish airspace

With Turkey refusing to apologise over the incident, Russia announces a package of economic sanctions against Turkey, including restrictions on imports and travel.

Turkey condemns Russian "provocation" after Turkish media publish an image showing a Russian serviceman holding a rocket launcher aboard a warship passing through the Bosphorus.

A Russian warship fires "warning shots" at a Turkish fishing vess

"Despite numerous attempts by the crew of the Smetlivy, the crew of the Turkish fishing boat did not make radio contact and did not respond to visual signals by semaphore or warning flares,"

President Vladimir Putin described as a "stab in the back" Turkey's downing of the Russian bomber and has imposed economic sanctions.

Russian warship fires warning shots at Turkish fishing boat

The chief cited another shooting just a day earlier, when 61-year-old twin brothers allegedly attacked customers and shot a man in the face in a Coney Island hot dog shop in the city after getting angry that the restaurant didn’t have fried mushrooms.

“When we look at our homicide picture for this year," the chief said, "while we’re reporting a decline, we know that 31 percent of our homicides are caused by a simple argument.”

He also referenced a recent slaying over a liquor bottle left in a front lawn, as well as the January killing of a 3-year-old boy who was shot in the back seat of a car on the way to see Sesame Street Live after a gunman reportedly thought the child’s godmother had cut him off on the freeway.

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.

After Davis' firing, a new investigator was assigned, who ruled the shooting justifiable, and police accounts given after Chatman died told a story that differed in important points from Davis' assessment

He runs across the street and squeezes between two parked cars as Fry's partner, Officer Lou Toth, gives chase. Chatman then hits an all-out sprint along the sidewalk toward an intersection. Toth sprints behind him.Fry draws his handgun in the middle of the street, plants his feet near the intersection in a firing stance as Chatman appears to still be running away. Chatman is out of camera shot at the time, and it does not reveal his moves.

In ordering the videos' release, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Gettleman indicated Fry might have put his partner's life in danger, saying Toth was running so close to the teen when shots rang out "you might say he was in the line of fire."

He has had 30 complaints lodged against him over the years, including 10 allegations of excessive use of force. The police department found every complaint against him to be unwarranted.In one case in 2007, Fry and a partner shot a 16-year-old black male in a school alcove after seeing a shiny object around his waist and fearing for their lives. The object wasn't a weapon but a "shiny belt buckle," according to an independent investigation of the shooting.

Both were about 10 blocks away at the time of the shooting. The law in Illinois allows for anyone who sets in motion a chain of events that results in the death of another individual to be charged with murder.

Outrage over police shootings have rumbled through Chicago since the November release of the fatal police shooting video of Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times. Attorney's for his family accused police of threatening witnesses and falsifying their accounts.Chicago Alderman Anthony Beale has criticized investigations into police violence as being flawed."For years we've had a systemic problem with the police officers protecting one another. And that's why you have such distrust in the community," he told CNN's Don Lemo

n.But he also sees police as an essential part of the community and wa

s worried that they might feel intimidated by the scrutiny.

Judge Gettleman scolded the city and mayor's office, saying it was "irresponsible" to waste taxpayers' money and the court's time with its previous opposition. "I'm very disturbed at the way this happened," he said. "This should not have happened the way it did."He blasted city attorneys for the December motion in which they stated it was not clear from the videos who fired at Chatman. Gettlemen said that wasn't true: "It's clear to me who fired the shots."

The White House on Tuesday said that the pause will not have a significant effect on the country’s vaccination campaign, which has accelerated in recent weeks as a rise in new virus cases threatens a fourth possible surge.

“Over the last few weeks, we have made available more than 25 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna each week, and in fact this week we will make available 28 million doses of these vaccines,” Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said on Tuesday.

As of Monday, 36 percent of the country’s total population has received at least one shot of a vaccine, and 22 percent are fully vaccinated, according to data from the C.D.C.

Even though the reaction to the Johnson & Johnson shot is rare, any questions about the safety of the shots could bolster vaccine hesitancy.

Nearly seven million people in the United States have received Johnson & Johnson shots so far, and roughly nine million more doses have been shipped out to the states, according to data from the C.D.C. The six women who developed blood clots were between the ages of 18 and 48.

“I know there are people who have gotten the vaccine, who are probably very concerned. For people who got the vaccine more than a month ago, the risk to them is very low at this time,” Dr. Schuchat said.

On Friday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that New York expected to receive 34,900 Johnson & Johnson shots, a decrease of 88 percent from the previous week

Dr. Zucker, New York’s health commissioner, said that the state would honor appointments made at state-run mass vaccination sites for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by giving people the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine instead.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said that the city would do the same, rescheduling appointments at city-run vaccine sites.“Every site has been told this morning to stop giving the J&J shots,” he said at a news conference.

Both Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at separate appearances last month, which they framed as an effort to boost confidence in that vaccine’s efficacy rate and to address vaccine hesitancy.

Regulators in Europe and elsewhere are concerned about a similar issue with another coronavirus vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University researchers.

"Vaccine hesitancy is a big problem for all of us,"

Up until now, the nationwide vaccine campaign has seen demand outstrip supply, but Mokdad says he believes that will soon change. By May, he believes, "We will have more vaccines than people willing to take the vaccine."

The numbers who may refuse the vaccine remain potentially too high to contain a respiratory virus such as SARS-CoV-2, which requires a large segment of the population to be immune.

But the fall and winter could be a different story. Scarpino says he believes that more contagious variants such as the one first reported in the U.K. will dominate the fall and winter COVID-19 season, raising the herd immunity threshold. Variants with higher transmissibility may require a larger share of the population to be immune before they can be contained.

"What most of us want is a safe return to something that looks more normal," says Samuel Scarpino, who models the coronavirus outbreak at Northeastern University. "That to me means 80% to 85%, probably, vaccinated."

And roughly 20% of the population are children under the age of 16, who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine — making it even more crucial that adults do get vaccinated.

Nobody knows exactly how large, but based on other diseases, researchers believe it is far above the current 32% of the U.S. population that's gotten at least one shot to date.

"It's very hard to convince people to take the vaccine in summer, when everything is going good,"

Scarpino and Mokdad say the problem will not be immediately apparent. Both scientists expect COVID-19 cases to drop over the summer months when a combination of vaccinations and warm weather will dramatically slow the virus down. Mokdad says he thinks the improved conditions will paradoxically make vaccination more difficult.

Moderate rates of vaccination will prevent a nationwide crisis such as that seen during the winter of 2020 and 2021, he says. But he worries regional outbreaks could still overwhelm hospitals, close schools and force local governments to reinstitute restrictions in different parts of the United States, especially in areas where vaccination rates are low.

The reasons for saying "no" to a vaccine are often complex.

"I don't think there's one particular group," says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "I don't think that it works to classify people who are vaccine hesitant all having the same reason for being vaccine hesitant."

Koltai says that misinformation is proliferating right now, often tailored to different groups with different grievances

"You need to speak to these different groups: the minority groups, the Republicans and the other people who feel like they have some distrust in science," she says. Often the best way to do so, she says, is through groups and leaders at a local level who are in favor of vaccination.

Last week, the Biden administration launched a major initiative to try and encourage vaccination by enlisting faith groups, unions and even NASCAR to promote getting vaccinated. It's the kind of broad, grassroots effort experts say can help.

The question is, will it be enough? "We need to vaccinate as much as possible right now, stop the circulation of this virus in the U.S. and elsewhere," Mokdad says. "Then we can control it."

He added that Mr. Rahim had been under investigation because he was “communicating with and spreading ISIS propaganda online.”

, F.B.I. agents said Mr. Rahim, 26, had been under surveillance since at least late May, when he bought three knives on Amazon.com.

Mr. Rahim was focused on a “planned victim in another state” who was not identified. But in a subsequent conversation on June 2, Mr. Rahim called Mr. Wright and told him he was going to “go after” the “boys in blue,” a reference to police officers.

Mr. Rahim was a religious mentor to his nephew David Wright, who was also known as Dawud Wright, Mr. Rivero said.

On Tuesday, an F.B.I. agent and a police officver approached Mr. Rahim around 7 a.m. on Tuesday outside a CVS Pharmacy in Roslindale, a middle-class Boston neighborhood. Officials said that after the law enforcement officials identified themselves, Mr. Rahim confronted them with a large military-style knife.

After the shooting Tuesday, Mr. Rahim was taken to a hospital, where he died.

Mr. Wright as a tall, quiet man who weighed as much as 400 pounds.

Mr. Rahim’s relatives had initially argued that he was shot in the back, insisting that the shooting was unjustified.

“They were dressed in Army camouflage and carrying a battering ram,” said Jim Brennan, 48, a bricklayer, who lives across the street. He said the officers had carried out several small brown paper bags labeled “evidence,” but he could not tell what was in them. He said they did not carry out any large items, such as a computer

I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.

Maybe lethal force wasn’t necessary, but science has proven that Brown turned and moved back toward Wilson (at least 20 feet) and was not shot from behind. There was undeniably an altercation at/inside the police cruiser. Does the fact that one man is alive and one is dead skew the way those facts are interpreted? Absolutely. But there exist certain physical certainties that strongly suggest this was not cold-blooded murder.

there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.

Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.

on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.

"This is absolutely one of the scariest things I've ever seen," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr., who took the reins this week, said after watching a video of the shooting. "This guy tried to execute the police officer. The police officer had no idea he was coming. It's amazing he's alive."

The Democrats’ message, Schrier said, should be clear and simple: All vaccines are good. And the best thing American can do to protect themselves and their loved ones is to get a shot.

Pelosi spokesman Henry Connelly said the Speaker was simply reflecting concerns in her diverse caucus about whether minority communities were being treated equitably in the aggressive push to vaccinate all Americans.

That disparity has been attributed, in part, to the fact that the earlier Moderna and Pfizer vaccines each require two shots and colder refrigeration, complicating storage and distribution. That’s created additional barriers for getting the vaccine to poorer, historically underserved populations and rural communities.

Black people are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white people and nearly two times more likely to die from the disease; Hispanics are more than three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than whites and 2.3 times more likely to die. 

White people have been vaccinated for COVID-19 at two times the rate of Black people, according to a New York Times analysis. The figures are worse for Hispanics. 

The disagreement among Democrats comes during a pivotal moment in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic as states like Texas and Mississippi end their mask mandates and lift restrictions on businesses, and health experts worry about a surge in cases driven by COVID-19 variants.

Because the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one shot and regular refrigeration levels, some officials like New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) have ordered that shipments of that vaccine be prioritized for harder-to-reach Black and brown communities. 

But while Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an overall efficacy of about 95 percent in preventing moderate to severe disease, that number for the Johnson & Johnson version is just 66 percent — though experts point out the J&J vaccine was being tested after more contagious variants had begun spreading in the U.S., unlike the Pfizer and Moderna versions. 

That's led to some in those minority communities voicing concerns in recent days that they are being given a less-effective vaccine than more affluent, white communities.

Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), another CBC member, noted that those suspicions have historic roots, pointing to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study — a deadly federal research project that targeted poor Black people in rural Alabama in 1930s — as evidence of the "painful history" of biomedical mistreatment of African Americans in the United States. 

Despite such reservations, the broad consensus in the caucus appears to favor efforts to maximize vaccinations in the shortest possible time, regardless which shot is available in a given community.

On Wednesday, Kelly is set to join Rep. Joyce BeattyJoyce Birdson BeattyDemocrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Black Caucus backs Biden's pick to head DOJ Civil Rights Division Sole GOP vote on House police reform bill says he 'accidentally pressed the wrong voting button' MORE (D-Ohio), head of the Black Caucus, in an online forum with medical experts designed to educate minority communities on best vaccine practices. 

Rep. Anthony BrownAnthony Gregory BrownOvernight Defense: Pentagon chief to press for Manchin's support on Colin Kahl | House Dems seek to limit transfer of military-grade gear to police Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy 140 lawmakers call for Biden administration to take 'comprehensive' approach to Iran MORE (D-Md.) said officials should monitor the distribution of vaccines to identify “patterns” that might indicate prejudices in the dispensation. But he’s also encouraging all of his constituents to get whatever vaccine is available first, and he highlighted the advantages of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, particularly in hard-to-reach populations like the homeless. 

Beginning Friday, a dramatically larger pool of people trained in injections will be eligible to give Covid-19 shots, including dentists, medical students, midwives, optometrists, paramedics, podiatrists and veterinarians.

In his speech, Biden will also announce new vaccination incentives, new outreach efforts to educate Americans about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and new steps to make it easier for Americans to get the shot.

Four of the nation's largest childcare providers will offer free childcare from now until July 4 to Americans who are getting their Covid-19 vaccine or recovering from the shot, the White House announced Wednesday.

Starting next week, thousands of pharmacies, including Albertsons, CVS, Rite-Aid, and Walgreens will stay open late every Friday in June in order to allow more Americans to get vaccinated.

Thousands of employers and businesses have also offered incentives for Americans to get vaccinated this month. Nearly 51% of the total US population has received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, and nearly 41% of the total population is fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.

CDC data shows 12 states have met the Biden administration's goal to have 70% of adults with at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. California and Maryland recently joined Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont in reaching that benchmark.

Three Covid-19 vaccines have emergency use authorization by the FDA -- the two-shot Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines and the one shot vaccine from Johnson & Johnson.