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, when parents refuse vaccines it's usually due to concerns about children receiving too many shots or developing side effects, including autism

concluded childhood vaccines are safe, and a complete retraction of the study that spawned the fear that vaccines cause autism

One reason may be that some parents are trying to protect their children's immunity from diseases by insisting on specialized diets and natural living practices instead of vaccines, according to a different study.

"Vaccines are becoming the victims of their own success. Most people have never witnessed the infections that vaccines prevent."

If enough people get vaccinated you achieve "herd immunity" -- the bodies of so many people have been tricked that there's little chance of a widespread outbreak

"It's a life-threatening problem. Some people could die because you're not vaccinating," Yang said.

"It's an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I'm not going to put my child at risk to save another child," Wolfson said

Sunday night’s debate, hosted by NBC News and the Congressional Black Caucus, may give voters the purest look at the differences between the candidates thus far.

The two previous debates were overshadowed by late-breaking news that came in the day before candidates met onstage (the Paris terror attack in November and the Democratic data breach in December

Clinton has plenty of other fodder with which to attack Sanders on gun

In the previous two weeks, the Clinton and Sanders campaigns have exchanged fire on Wall Street regulations, electability, guns, health care, and whether a new Sanders TV ad qualifies as negative.

Sanders worked to remove another piece of baggage the night before the debate, when his campaign announced he would support a bill to revoke the legal immunity granted to gun makers by a 2005 bill for which Sanders voted

Clinton would not give Sanders a pass on what he called a “debate-eve conversion.” Expect the words “flip flop” to come up a lot as Clinton tries to paint Sanders as typical politician. 

Sanders has yet to release the details of a tax plan he needs to fund his proposed single-payer health care plan, and his campaign has given conflicting answers about when it would come.

On health care, Clinton and Sanders have a deep policy difference that reflect a philosophical as well as strategic divide. Sanders supports a single-payer system, while Clinton has defended Obamacare, saying she wants to improve the president’s sweeping healthcare law.  

Clinton and her staff made a series of claims about Sanders’ proposal that many found tendentious

And even many Clinton allies have privately expressed doubts about the wisdom of campaign’s strategy to accuse Sanders of violating his own pledge not to run negative TV ads

When the vaccine is injected back into the patient, the body's entire immune system recognises the cancer to attack.

Keyoumars Ashkan, professor of neurosurgery at King's College Hospital in London, who was the trial's European chief investigator, said the results gave "new hope to the patients and clinicians battling with this terrible disease".

"Cautious optimism is welcome in an area where for so long the disease and suffering have had the upper hand."

All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Cepi’s original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project. “Our experience with vaccine development is that you can’t anticipate where you’re going to stumble,” says Hatchett, meaning that diversity is key. And the stage where any approach is most likely to stumble is clinical or human trials, which, for some of the candidates, are about to get under way.

An illustration of that is a vaccine that was produced in the 1960s against respiratory syncytial virus, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms in children. In clinical trials, this vaccine was found to aggravate those symptoms in infants who went on to catch the virus. A similar effect was observed in animals given an early experimental Sars vaccine. It was later modified to eliminate that problem but, now that it has been repurposed for Sars-CoV-2, it will need to be put through especially stringent safety testing to rule out the risk of enhanced disease.

Once a Covid-19 vaccine has been approved, a further set of challenges will present itself. “Getting a vaccine that’s proven to be safe and effective in humans takes one at best about a third of the way to what’s needed for a global immunisation programme,” says global health expert Jonathan Quick of Duke University in North Carolina, author of The End of Epidemics (2018). “Virus biology and vaccines technology could be the limiting factors, but politics and economics are far more likely to be the barrier to immunisation.”

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines. During the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, for example, vaccine supplies were snapped up by nations that could afford them, leaving poorer ones short. But you could also imagine a scenario where, say, India – a major supplier of vaccines to the developing world – not unreasonably decides to use its vaccine production to protect its own 1.3 billion-strong population first, before exporting any.

• This article was amended on 19 March 2020. An earlier version incorrectly stated that the Sabin Vaccine Institute was collaborating with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) on a Covid-19 vaccine.

Sars-CoV-2 shares between 80% and 90% of its genetic material with the virus that caused Sars – hence its name. Both consist of a strip of ribonucleic acid (RNA) inside a spherical protein capsule that is covered in spikes. The spikes lock on to receptors on the surface of cells lining the human lung – the same type of receptor in both cases – allowing the virus to break into the cell. Once inside, it hijacks the cell’s reproductive machinery to produce more copies of itself, before breaking out of the cell again and killing it in the process.

Coronaviruses have caused two other recent epidemics – severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China in 2002-04, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which started in Saudi Arabia in 2012. In both cases, work began on vaccines that were later shelved when the outbreaks were contained.

Though nobody could have predicted that the next infectious disease to threaten the globe would be caused by a coronavirus – flu is generally considered to pose the greatest pandemic risk – vaccinologists had hedged their bets by working on “prototype” pathogens.

All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Some of the Covid-19 vaccine projects are using these tried-and-tested approaches, but others are using newer technology.

Cepi’s original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project.

Clinical trials, an essential precursor to regulatory approval, usually take place in three phases. The first, involving a few dozen healthy volunteers, tests the vaccine for safety, monitoring for adverse effects. The second, involving several hundred people, usually in a part of the world affected by the disease, looks at how effective the vaccine is, and the third does the same in several thousand people. But there’s a high level of attrition as experimental vaccines pass through these phases.

There are good reasons for that. Either the candidates are unsafe, or they’re ineffective, or both. Screening out duds is essential, which is why clinical trials can’t be skipped or hurried. Approval can be accelerated if regulators have approved similar products before.

No vaccine made from genetic material – RNA or DNA – has been approved to date, for example. So the Covid-19 vaccine candidates have to be treated as brand new vaccines, and as Gellin says: “While there is a push to do things as fast as possible, it’s really important not to take shortcuts.”

It’s for these reasons that taking a vaccine candidate all the way to regulatory approval typically takes a decade or more, and why President Trump sowed confusion when, at a meeting at the White House on 2 March, he pressed for a vaccine to be ready by the US elections in November – an impossible deadline.

In the meantime, there is another potential problem. As soon as a vaccine is approved, it’s going to be needed in vast quantities – and many of the organisations in the Covid-19 vaccine race simply don’t have the necessary production capacity. Vaccine development is already a risky affair, in business terms, because so few candidates get anywhere near the clinic. Production facilities tend to be tailored to specific vaccines, and scaling these up when you don’t yet know if your product will succeed is not commercially feasible. Cepi and similar organisations exist to shoulder some of the risk, keeping companies incentivised to develop much-needed vaccines. Cepi plans to invest in developing a Covid-19 vaccine and boosting manufacturing capacity in parallel, and earlier this month it put out a call for $2bn to allow it to do so.

The problem is making sure the vaccine gets to all those who need it. This is a challenge even within countries, and some have worked out guidelines. In the scenario of a flu pandemic, for example, the UK would prioritise vaccinating healthcare and social care workers, along with those considered at highest medical risk – including children and pregnant women – with the overall goal of keeping sickness and death rates as low as possible. But in a pandemic, countries also have to compete with each other for medicines.

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines.

Outside of pandemics, the WHO brings governments, charitable foundations and vaccine-makers together to agree an equitable global distribution strategy, and organisations like Gavi, the vaccine alliance, have come up with innovative funding mechanisms to raise money on the markets for ensuring supply to poorer countries. But each pandemic is different, and no country is bound by any arrangement the WHO proposes – leaving many unknowns.

In a matter of weeks, China has gone from being the epicenter of the virus to almost the only refuge from it, prompting hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens abroad to flock home. Some 20,000 people are arriving on flights into China every day

“Certainly, China is indeed very safe now,” said Li, while the United States is just becoming more dangerous.

“The U.S. can’t test everyone, like in China. Testing an entire planeload of passengers and providing results the next day is impossible in the U.S.,” he said, referring to the entry procedures he went through on arrival in his home country.

There has also been a rush of returned from Britain since a government adviser advocated a “herd immunity” strategy, suggesting that it could be helpful if 60 percent of the population was infected.

Beijing’s municipal government on Sunday introduced new rules requiring all people arriving in the capital go into “centralized quarantine” at hotels for 14 days upon arrival, at their own expense.

Areas around the country, from Inner Mongolia in the north to Sanya on the island of Hainan in the south, have instituted similar measures, requiring stays in quarantine centers rather than trusting people to isolate themselves at home. More local authorities are expected to follow suit.

Beijing police authorities have made an example of a 37-year-old Chinese woman who works at Massachusetts biotechnology company Biogen and attended the Boston conference that has been linked to other infections, according to local media reports

She failed to report she was feeling sick before boarding her flight, took painkillers to suppress her fever and then lied to flight attendants about her condition, local police said.

The suspicious attendants reported her to police authorities upon arrival, who quarantined her and had her tested for the virus. It came back positive. In addition to being sick, she is now under criminal investigation for obstructing infectious disease prevention.

SARS-CoV-2 is not thought to present a risk at distances further than six feet. Instead, the virus’s principal mode of spread appears to be through prolonged social contact, such as occurs in family groupings.

SARS-CoV-2 is principally a risk to the elderly, those sixty and over, and people with underlying medical conditions.

There is also no firm evidence, as yet, that children are a significant vector of infection

On the debit side, there is mounting evidence that people who are symptom-free but infected may be capable of transmitting the virus

the average reproduction rate of SARS-CoV-2—that is, the number of people who will be infected by one infected person—is running at 2.2, which is markedly higher than the rate for Spanish flu, which was 1.8. 

in 1918 almost everyone had been exposed to some type of influenza before, meaning most people could count on a degree of immunity. The result was that the Spanish flu infected only a third of the world’s population. By contrast, no one has any immunity to the new coronavirus—hence the estimates that as much as 80 percent of the world’s population could have been infected by the time the pandemic will have run its course. 

The greatest reason for concern, though, is that so far, SARS-CoV-2 appears to kill about 2 percent of confirmed cases. That is a very similar mortality rate to the Spanish flu.

even that should not be a cause for panic or despair.

One of the chief lessons of the 1918 pandemic is that cities such as St. Louis that acted early and decisively to contain the virus by banning large public gatherings, closing schools, and isolating ill or suspected case, fared notably better than cities such as Philadelphia that failed to take timely measures or did not sustain them.

arious models for tackling the pandemic are now being live trialled around the world

My conversations have convinced me that the British approach is rooted in scientific logic and a careful calibration of the different risks. I’m no epidemiologist so I won’t pretend to be a qualified judge of whether they are doing the right thing. I am persuaded that they are sincerely endeavouring to do the right thing.

the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues,

“You can contain clusters,” Dr. Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”

The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday.

Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home

Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.

It was not at all clear that a nation so fundamentally committed to individual liberty and distrustful of government could learn to adapt to many of these measures, especially those that smack of state compulsion.

What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The Times.

they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done.

medical experts should be at the microphone now to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs.

doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace. Containment becomes realistic only when Americans realize that working together is the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones.

Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health.

“At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,”

The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing.If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.

The virus would die out on every contaminated surface and, because almost everyone shows symptoms within two weeks, it would be evident who was infected. If we had enough tests for every American, even the completely asymptomatic cases could be found and isolated.

The crisis would be over.

Obviously, there is no magic wand, and no 300 million tests. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze.

In contrast to the halting steps taken here, China shut down Wuhan — the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak — and restricted movement in much of the country on Jan. 23, when the country had a mere 500 cases and 17 deaths.Its rapid action had an important effect: With the virus mostly isolated in one province, the rest of China was able to save Wuhan.

Even as many cities fought their own smaller outbreaks, they sent 40,000 medical workers into Wuhan, roughly doubling its medical force.

Stop transmission within cities

the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart.

People in lockdown adapt. In Wuhan, apartment complexes submit group orders for food, medicine, diapers and other essentials. Shipments are assembled at grocery warehouses or government pantries and dropped off. In Italy, trapped neighbors serenade one another.

Each day’s delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill.

South Korea avoided locking down any city, but only by moving early and with extraordinary speed. In January, the country had four companies making tests, and as of March 9 had tested 210,000 citizens — the equivalent of testing 2.3 million Americans.

As of the same date, fewer than 9,000 Americans had been tested.

Fix the testing mess

Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected.In China, those seeking a test must describe their symptoms on a telemedicine website. If a nurse decides a test is warranted, they are directed to one of dozens of “fever clinics” set up far from all other patients.

Isolate the infected

As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75 to 80 percent of all transmission occurred in family clusters.

Cellphone videos from China show police officers knocking on doors and taking temperatures. In some, people who resist are dragged away by force. The city of Ningbo offered bounties of $1,400 to anyone who turned in a coronavirus sufferer.

In China, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, leader of the World Health Organization’s observer team there, people originally resisted leaving home or seeing their children go into isolation centers with no visiting rights — just as Americans no doubt would.

In China, they came to accept it.“They realized they were keeping their families safe,” he said. “Also, isolation is really lonely. It’s psychologically difficult. Here, they were all together with other people in the same boat. They supported each other.”

Find the fevers

Make masks ubiquitous

In China, having a fever means a mandatory trip to a fever clinic to check for coronavirus. In the Wuhan area, different cities took different approaches.

In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required.

The city of Qianjiang, by contrast, offered the same amount of money to any resident who came in voluntarily and tested positive

Voluntary approaches, like explaining to patients that they will be keeping family and friends safe, are more likely to work in the West, she added.

Trace the contacts

Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected.

Dr. Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to “do their own contact tracing.” Social media also is used in Asia, but in different ways

When he lectured at a Singapore university, Dr. Heymann said, dozens of students were in the room. But just before he began class, they were photographed to record where everyone sat.

Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate under the care and observation of nurses.

There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally make it mandatory that people wear them.

The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained.All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached.

Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging

Preserve vital services

Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing across state lines to cities and suburbs

“I sense that most people — and certainly those in business — get it. They would prefer to take the bitter medicine at once and contain outbreaks as they start rather than gamble with uncertainty.”

Produce ventilators and oxygen

The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so.

Canadian nurses are disseminating a 2006 paper describing how one ventilator can be modified to treat four patients simultaneously. Inventors have proposed combining C-PAP machines, which many apnea sufferers own, and oxygen tanks to improvise a ventilator.

One of the lessons of China, he noted, was that many Covid-19 patients who would normally have been intubated and on ventilators managed to survive with oxygen alone.

Retrofit hospitals

In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided: 48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births.

Wherever that was impractical, hospitals were divided into “clean” and “dirty” zones, and the medical teams did not cross over. Walls to isolate whole wards were built

Decide when to close schools

Recruit volunteers

China’s effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a “people’s war” and rolled out a “Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!” campaign.

Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders, or as crematory workers.

“In my experience, success is dependent on how much the public is informed and participates,” Admiral Ziemer said. “This truly is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation.”

Prioritize the treatments

Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use.

An alternative is to harvest protective antibodies from the blood of people who have survived the illness,

The purified blood serum — called immunoglobulin — could possibly be used in small amounts to protect emergency medical workers, too.

“Unfortunately, the first wave won’t benefit from this,” Dr. Hotez said. “We need to wait until we have enough survivors.”Find a vaccine

testing those candidate vaccines for safety and effectiveness takes time.

The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear.

After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective.

If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not — and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given.

In the past, some experimental vaccines have produced serious side effects, like Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can paralyze and kill. A greater danger, experts said, is that some experimental vaccines, paradoxically, cause “immune enhancement,” meaning they make it more likely, not less, that recipients will get a disease. That would be a disaster.

One candidate coronavirus vaccine Dr. Hotez invented 10 years ago in the wake of SARS, he said, had to be abandoned when it appeared to make mice more likely to die from pneumonia when they were experimentally infected with the virus.

Reach out to other nations

Every report showing the scale of the crisis should be framed in the language of accountability and anchored in the premise of preventability.

With all the benefits of hindsight, the government dragged its feet, wasted precious time and infused the issue with a sense of British exceptionalism: drastic measures need not be taken because in the UK things will somehow be different.

Johnson’s illness was folded into a larger, editorialised narrative about his martyrdom and indefatigability, turning his sickness and recovery into a virtue of character

Questions over his responsibility for the national carnage – his complacent messaging over shaking hands with the afflicted, his delay in shutting down the country, his “herd immunity” policy, the ongoing lack of testing, of equipment and of ventilators – were not asked.

The terminology of war did much of the work. The virus was framed in the context of an enemy to be fought in the trenches, rather than a series of public health policy failures

The Queen’s message, a call for noble resolve, further generalised the crisis into an act of God that we must weather by mobilising the powers of the British national character. It’s now a matter of grit, of reaching into our reserves to see us through until we meet again.

Despite the extent of the crisis, many doctors and nurses fear speaking on the record

I have received WhatsApp messages from NHS staff too afraid even to email them in case the paper trail leads to disciplinary action – detailing horrors of an NHS stretched thin, of ill-protected staff doing 36-hour shifts. They will be clapped every week, as the government claims to champion the NHS, yet gagged if they dare raise concerns

. It’s hard, as we lock down, to nurture an outrage that is based on decisions in the past when the loss of life is happening today – more so when the government has stealthily removed itself from the picture and shifted the responsibility entirely on to the public, responding to any concerns by robotically repeating the mantra: “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”

Relocate the pain and recall that this need not have happened. Ten thousand people, in UK hospitals alone, have now died.

“Basically we are trying to do the same thing that most countries are doing — slow down the spread as much as possible,” he said. “It’s just that we use slightly different tools than many other countries.”

When responses are assessed after the crisis, Mr. Tegnell acknowledges, Sweden will have to face its broad failing with people over the age of 70, who have accounted for a staggering 86 percent of the country’s 2,194 fatalities to date.

“They tell people, stay home, but they also keep the restaurants open,” said Lena Einhorn, a virologist and one of the signatories of the letter. “They are advising people working in elderly homes only to wear masks when a patient is sick. Their policies are both ambiguous and rigid.”

In the absence of recommendations from the Public Health Authority, a Jewish care home near Stockholm unilaterally decided to ban visitors, said Aviva Kraitsik, the head of operations, who asked that the facility’s name be withheld because of previous threats it has received.

The health authority even went so far as to order the “no visitors” signs removed. Ms. Kraitsik refused. “I said they could put me behind bars,” she said. “I was prepared to take my punishment to protect our residents.”But it was too late. The virus had already crept inside, and eventually killed 11 of the 76 inhabitants.

It was only after the home required employees to wear face shields and masks when working with all the residents, even those displaying no symptoms, that it managed to halt the spread of the infection, Ms. Kraitsik said.

“We anticipated a prolonged period of social distancing would be necessary, but didn’t initially realize that it could be this long,” Dr. Kissler said.

Students will be able to seek an exemption from the COVID-19 vaccination requirement "for medical or religious reasons," Rutgers said. The rule would also not apply to students who are in online programs.

Rutgers already requires new or transferring students to show proof of receiving several vaccines, hoping to prevent on-campus cases of diseases from measles, mumps and rubella to hepatitis B and meningitis.

Speculation that colleges might make COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory for students and staff began even before the first vaccines received authorization in December.

In a move that could help the vaccination effort, Rutgers said that New Jersey officials recently approved the university's health clinics to administer vaccine shots on campus for faculty, staff and students when vaccine doses become available — which has not yet happened.

A vaccination program will help Rutgers bolster the health and safety of "all members of our community of more than 71,000 students, the cities we are in and the communities we serve throughout New Jersey," said Antonio Calcado, the university's executive vice president and chief operating officer

Rutgers students can receive any of the three vaccines that are currently authorized for emergency use in the U.S. to satisfy the new rule, the school said. It added that incoming students who are under 18 years old may only be eligible for the Pfizer vaccine.

Consider a slice of Florida’s seniors, ages 65 to 74, who have been eligible for vaccination for four months. Almost all seniors in the state’s wealthiest county, St. Johns, have been vaccinated. (The numbers may be inflated because of seasonal residents, or snowbirds, who aren’t necessarily counted as part of the county’s population but are still counted among people getting vaccinated there.) But the first county west of St. Johns is one of the state’s poorest: Putnam, where the median annual income is about $35,000. Only half of the county’s residents ages 65 to 74 have been vaccinated.

The reasons are myriad: The state’s rollout has been deeply reliant on tech savviness and reliable transportation to secure and then get to vaccination appointments, said Dr. Frederick Anderson, who runs a community health clinic at Florida International University’s medical school. Additionally, some of the current vaccines are difficult to store and transport, which makes vaccine rollout easier in population hubs, which tend to be wealthier.

When eligibility is expanded in other states, vaccinations are expected to surge among the wealthiest Americans and lag among the poorest.

“The rural counties are lagging slightly behind what we would expect,” said Dave Jeppesen, the director of Idaho’s health department, in a news conference Wednesday.

Nationally, many conservatives — men in particular — have said in multiple polls that they do not wish to be vaccinated. In some of Idaho’s more conservative counties, senior vaccination rates are below 40 percent.

If that's the case, it will take more than just opening up eligibility to get the country to levels of vaccination that can reach herd immunity — when roughly 70 percent of people are vaccinated, making it too difficult for the virus to spread.

The new study will include more than 12,000 college students immunized with the Moderna vaccine at more than 20 universities across the United States. Half of the students will be randomly selected to receive the vaccine right after they are enrolled, while the other half will get the vaccine four months later.

By monitoring the students so closely, the scientists expect to be able to track infections in the first 24 or 48 hours, and determine how long an infected person may transmit the virus to others, Dr. Corey said.

College students are an ideal population in which to study transmission after vaccination. They have among the highest rates of coronavirus infection, in large part because they live in tightly packed dormitories and have more social contacts than older adults do, while fortunately, hospitalizations and deaths are comparatively low.

"The digital health pass is an electronic version of the index card that you get when you get your full immunization," explains Tim Paydos, a vice president of government industry solutions at IBM. Given that paper records can be misplaced, or forged, there's a benefit to the digital pass. He says it's a free, voluntary and convenient way to share your COVID-19 vaccination or test status.

He says there are several ways employers, event venues, cruise lines, or airlines could help ensure a safe environment, and still give people choices. "It may be acceptable to have people show either proof of vaccination, proof of a negative test, or proof of a recent episode with COVID," Parasidis says. "There are a lot of different options."

Even if more cases are discovered, the risk of this happening to you remains vanishingly slim.

There is a possibility that the vaccine will be only recommended to certain age groups that are less at risk for blood clots, as have been implemented in countries like Canada for the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been linked to similar blood clotting episodes. To make that kind of informed assessment, advisers and regulators need to have a complete set of data and sufficient time to thoroughly review it.

This means that if you received this vaccine and you are under 50, the odds are in your favor.

The pause and the resulting careful, transparent deliberation shows our regulatory systems are robust and cautious.

In March of 2020, for example, he forwarded a correspondence about the possible Covid-19 immunity of indigenous people harvesting guano (bat excrement), as well as an idea from a psychiatry professor about using the antibiotic minocycline to slow viral replication. He commented on an email from a Swedish psychiatrist, "There may be nothing to this, but we should at least be aware." And in April of that year, he told a persistent doctor with multiple ideas for possible antiviral agents, "You are not being ignored."

I find the emails about the funding of Fauci's agency particularly fascinating. Over the course of the messages, budget discussions transition from small funding increases to tremendous week-on-week growths in expenditures -- particularly when the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was empowered by Congress to dream bigger thanks to $1.532 billion in supplemental appropriations. To put a finer point on this group of emails: it was these bigger dreams and bigger trials that provided us with important answers and, ultimately, with the vaccines.

I also, of course, note what is missing -- namely, many details from the White House Task Force. We get just little hints: "Let us discuss this when we are together at the 4:00 PM TF Meeting," for example. That history will have to wait. Only occasionally does any frustration with the federal government's response show up in the emails, such as when he is commenting on current Covid-19 tests being "misleading" or defending his public presence to fellow public health scientists: "I genuflect to no one but science and always, always speak my mind when it comes to public health."

Finally, in between the lines, we watch him manage this pandemic as a human. There are emails where he is clearly overwhelmed, forwarding media request after speaking request to his assistants at the Office of the Chief of Staff. (One has to wonder: who wouldn't be overwhelmed by this number of requests?)

There are emails where he is tremendously kind, thanking people for their service, telling staff to "stay well and safe" or complimenting folks on well-written papers and columns.

Again and again, he responds to concerned citizens, scientists and journalists with: "Thank you for your note." He pays attention both to people he knows -- apologetically telling Ralph Nader at 7 p.m. on a Sunday, "I receive over 1000 e-mails per day and even with staff screening, I do not see them for days." -- and to those he probably doesn't. There are times when he's funny, times when he's frustrated and times when he's clearly exhausted, admitting that he's simply too tired to make sense of something.

He is just like us -- or, at least, he's how most of us like to imagine ourselves to be, on our best days.

In a statement released by the hospital, according to the BBC, his wife Joy said her husband was "so grateful" to have been one of the first people in the world to be vaccinated against the virus.

The drama of his momentous jab was heightened by the fact that it took place just 20 miles from the birthplace of his playwright namesake.

Beyond his landmark immunization, Shakespeare was known for his community involvement and political activism. He worked as an official at local schools and was a parish councilor for three decades.

Shakespeare's love for the natural world remains on display through the trees he helped plant in the village of Allesley back during the 1980s, and in the local forests he worked to preserve.

The state reports that 51.1% of West Virginia's population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Justice hopes the state's new offers of a $588,000 second prize, weekend vacations to state parks, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, and custom hunting shotguns will boost that number.

West Virginians who have been fully vaccinated will need to register to be entered to win the newly announced prizes at a later date.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported as of Tuesday night that 40.9% of the population has been fully vaccinated. President Biden is aiming for at least 70% of the U.S. adult population to have one vaccine shot and 160 million adults to be fully vaccinated by July 4..