Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, says that some Americans could start receiving a COVID-19 vaccine by the second week of December.

While millions of people in the U.S. could be vaccinated in the weeks and months following an emergency use authorization, Slaoui said it will be well into 2021 before the nation would be able to achieve herd immunity.

Slaoui's comments on Sunday echo what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's top infectious disease expert, told NPR's Morning Edition this past Tuesday. Fauci said that Americans with the "highest priority" — such as health care workers and those most at risk of the virus — will likely receive a vaccine towards the end of December.

Later today, the U.S. International Development Finance Corp, or DFC, is expected to announce that it has extended a $590 million loan to ApiJect Systems America, NPR has learned. The Connecticut company makes a disposable injection device that it says can be mass produced to deliver vaccines and medications around the world.

"This is going to be, we believe, the next generation of safe injections worldwide," ApiJect Systems Corp. Executive Chairman Jay Walker told NPR.

That's what happened during the first phase of the pandemic when Americans rushed to doctors offices and medical centers to get COVID-19 tests only to be turned away because of a shortage of reagent chemicals, testing kits, and nose swabs. State laboratories that were also facing shortages began competing on the open marketplace for pipettes and lab materials they needed to process the tests.

Signs posted at the entrance to the grocery store in northwest Montana told customers to wear a mask. Public health officials in Flathead County urged the same. Infection rates here are among the highest in the state. Infection rates in the state are among the highest in the country.

"It's absolute garbage," he said. "There has been plenty of proof that the coronavirus 'pandemic,' if you will, links back to Communist China. It's communist Marxism that they're trying to push on this country."

As health care professionals grapple with soaring numbers of COVID-19 cases across the country, they're also combatting another quick-spreading and frustrating contagion: misinformation.

The day after Christmas, millions of Americans will lose their jobless benefits, according to a new study.

"Congress is set to cut off 12 million Americans from the only thing holding them back from falling into financial wreckage and disaster," says Andrew Stettner, a co-author of the new study from the progressive-leaning think tank the Century Foundation.

"Those will come to a crashing halt on Dec. 26, the day after Christmas," Stettner says. He says this is happening just as the pandemic is raging across the country and states and cities are reimposing restrictions on businesses and schools.

The numbers are also spiking in some areas that were spared the worst in the spring: Western New York has seen about 3,700 new cases in the last week alone, with rates of positive test results running above 5 percent.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo says his response to the pandemic continues to be aggressive and highlights his state’s achievements: New York is still seeing much lower rates of infection than most states. And the number of daily deaths and hospitalizations pales in comparison to the spring, when thousands died for several weeks running, and tens of thousands were sickened.

he defensive posture from Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, is striking considering the confident air he’s projected since the early days of the pandemic.

In another sign of the enduring nationwide impact of the coronavirus pandemic, New York City — still the U.S. city with the highest death toll — announced it will again close its schools for in-person learning as of Thursday, Nov. 19.

Of the city's approximately 1 million public school students, only about 300,000 had been attending school in person on a hybrid schedule, along with some pre-K and special education students who were able to attend full time.

"It's frankly ridiculous that you can go to a restaurant and have someone serve you a pizza indoors, but my child is being deprived of an education," she told NPR. "Our priorities are just backwards."

The United States has surpassed yet another devastating milestone in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: 250,000 Americans have now died from the disease. That's more than twice the number of U.S. service members killed in World War I.

"Unfortunately, we are entering what I think will be the worst stretch that we have experienced so far," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "We're seeing hot spots all across the country and new highs for the number of cases and hospitalizations."

With cases spiking, more deaths will follow — but advances in medicine in recent months have improved the odds of surviving COVID-19.

Covid-19 cases are up around the country, even in places that had low rates over the summer. In response, many states have increased restrictions and emphasized the need to prevent transmission. People are not listening

Families continue to make Thanksgiving plans. Large gatherings are continuing despite the warnings. This is happening outside of the United States, as well. There’s a phrase for this: “pandemic fatigue.” People are tired of changing their behavior because of the coronavirus.

Stemming the spread of Covid-19 requires exactly this — a change in private behavior. The virus is being spread in informal settings like parties, sleepovers, dinners in people’s homes. The spread has accelerated in recent weeks, as colder weather has moved more social gatherings indoors.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's foremost infectious disease expert, tells NPR that it's "OK to celebrate" the good news about Moderna's coronavirus vaccine, but warned it's not the time to back off on basic health measures.

The Food and Drug Administration set a minimum effectiveness of 50%. Fauci said a few months ago he would "like [a vaccine] to be 75% or more" effective. So the news of two vaccines showing early results of being 90% or higher "is a very, very important advance in our armamentarium of trying to stop this outbreak," Fauci said Tuesday.

The timeline is significantly quicker than the standard drug approval and distribution process. It's helped by the government's Operation Warp Speed, which has already paid companies billions of dollars to start making vaccines before they are approved.

Still, Biden's coronavirus advisory board co-chair Vivek Murthy says they're doing everything they can to ensure plans are ready to go on Inauguration Day — including stronger mask requirements.

"The worse this pandemic gets, there are more leaders, elected leaders, who are coming around to the fact that as unpalatable as these mandates might be, they are important and they actually work," Murthy said.

What is clear, he said, is that strict lockdowns aren't always necessary if people comply with less restrictive measures.

f Pfizer receives authorization for its vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks, as expected, the company in theory could vaccinate millions of Americans by the end of the year, taking advantage of months of planning and decades of experience

So it was cause for celebration this week when Pfizer announced that an early analysis showed its vaccine candidate was more than 90 percent effective.

The effort will hinge on collaboration among a network of companies, federal and state agencies, and on-the-ground health workers in the midst of a pandemic that is spreading faster than ever through the United States.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to reassert America's commitment to refugees, after the Trump White House has slashed the resettlement program, part of his anti-immigration drive.

In 2016, President Barack Obama aimed to admit 110,000 refugees. President Trump lowered the cap of refugee admissions every year of his presidency. For fiscal year 2021, he set the cap at 15,000, the lowest on record.

The agencies' budgets are based on the number of refugees admitted. Low admission levels reduced government funding, which decimated programs supporting newly arrived refugees. After the State Department told them to pare their operations, many agencies had to shutter or reduce offices and lay off workers.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping wants to "Make America Rake Again."

It's still not entirely clear how the Trump campaign ended up holding a press conference in Northeast Philadelphia near a sex shop, a crematorium and a jail. The hoopla was kicked off Saturday morning with a Trump tweet about an event at the Philadelphia Four Seasons.

At the press event, Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed without evidence that Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania was due to voter fraud. Four Seasons Total Landscaping declined requests for comment.

One of the strongest performers is Taiwan, with 446 confirmed cases and just seven deaths for nearly 24 million citizens, or 0.03 deaths per 100,000. On a per capita basis, the U.S. has 1,200 times as many Covid-19 deaths as Taiwan.

Taiwan could easily have had a Covid-19 disaster. It is situated less than 100 miles from China, and more than 1 million Taiwanese work in China. There is frequent travel between the two countries. As a result, Taiwan is at high risk of exposure to any novel infection that arises in China. So why didn’t it get slammed by SARS-Cov-2?

accidents of history, including the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that began in February 2003. It generated a culture of taking infections from China seriously — unlike what happened in the U.S. The island also has a strong “face mask” culture, which the U.S. should be emulating, but isn’t.

No one understands the CCP better than Taipei. Simply put, Taiwan operates on the premise that its cross-strait counterparts are inherently untrustworthy. This was a key factor in the rapidity and comprehensiveness with which Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration responded to reports of a strange new virus in late December.

The system of integrated rapid-response agencies behind Taiwan’s successful handling of Covid-19 emerged — at least partly — in response to Bejing’s attempts to prevent Taiwan attaining observer status at the WHO’s annual World Health Assembly (WHA), beginning in the late 1990s.

“The Chen administration, in order to improve its prospects of re-election in 2004, deliberately utilized the threat posed by the SARS pandemic to appeal to Taiwanese identity,” writes Björn Alexander Lindemann in a 2014 case study of Taiwan’s WHO bid. “The mobilization of the Taiwanese population during the SARS crisis indeed benefitted the DPP government in the 2004 elections [as] public discourse shifted... to the consequences of SARS and the threat that China posed to Taiwan’s security in the run-up to the presidential elections. People were left with the impression that the island had been left on its own and were thus susceptible to the government’s efforts to appeal to Taiwanese identity and nationalist sentiments.”1

Biden ran a heavily policy-focused campaign, releasing dozens of lengthy and ambitious plans ranging from large-scale economic and environmental initiatives to broad actions on racial justice, education and health care.

Biden heads into office with strategies to address the COVID-19 crisis and the search for a vaccine as well.

The sheer volume of Biden's plans could make it a challenge to execute them all. On immigration alone, he has proposed more than a dozen initiatives to complete within 100 days of taking office, a feat that could prove difficult to execute.

This has since been expanded to provide equal coverage to all citizens from birth, regardless of age, financial status or employment status. Furthermore, all foreigners who legally work or reside in Taiwan are also afforded the same coverage.

single-payer model

Implementing the Global Budget Payment on top of Fee-For-Service reimbursement method effectively reduced annual medical expenditure growth from 12 percent to 5 percent since 2003

Taiwanese citizens can see any doctor without a referral. They may also go to any level of hospital directly, as they wish. However, larger, more popular hospitals charge a higher co-payment and can be overcrowded. Seeing a GP is much cheaper.

Although the insurance scheme is run by the government, private providers including doctors and hospitals dominate the healthcare market. There are more private establishments than the public ones. All providers claim and compete for payments fro

Owing to the single insurer system, Taiwan's NHI has one of the lowest administrative costs in the world, typically under 2% of total healthcare spending. Every year, the Department of Health negotiates with physicians and hospitals to set the global budget, and this helps keep the cost of the NHI down.

WASHINGTON — If President Trump loses his bid for re-election, as looked increasingly likely on Wednesday, it would be the first defeat of an incumbent president in 28 years. But one thing seemed certain: Win or lose, he will not go quietly away.

At the very least, he has 76 days left in office to use his power as he sees fit and to seek revenge on some of his perceived adversaries.

and commanded about 48 percent of the popular vote, meaning he retained the support of nearly half of the public despite four years of scandal, setbacks, impeachment and the brutal coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 233,000 Americans.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Calling on election officials to “count every vote,” protesters marched through the streets of several American cities on Wednesday in response to President Trump’s aggressive effort to challenge the vote count in Tuesday’s presidential election.

In Minneapolis, protesters blocked a freeway, prompting arrests. In Portland, hundreds gathered on the waterfront to protest the president’s attempted interventions in the vote count as a separate group protesting the police and urging racial justice surged through downtown, smashing shop windows and confronting police officers and National Guard troops.

In Detroit, another group of pro-Trump poll watchers gathered earlier in the day outside a ballot-counting center, demanding that officials “stop the count” of ballots after the Trump campaign filed suit to halt the cou