By Rick Rojas
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
Louisiana is leading the nation in an explosion of new cases. Hospitals are overflowing and admitting more young people than before. But the crisis is also driving some to get vaccinated.
By Katie Rogers
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
The Biden administration is developing plans to require all foreign travelers to the United States to be vaccinated against Covid-19, with limited exceptions, according to an administration official with knowledge of the developing policy.
By Carl Zimmer and Sharon LaFraniere
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
The powerful protection offered by Moderna’s Covid vaccine does not wane in the first six months after the second dose, according to a statement released by the company on Thursday morning in advance of its earnings call.
But in slides prepared for the call, the company said it anticipated that boosters would be necessary this fall to contend with the Delta variant, which became common in the United States after the results were collected. “We believe a dose three of a booster will likely be necessary to keep us as safe as possible through the winter season in the Northern Hemisphere,” Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna, said during the earnings call.
By Sylvan Lane and Aris Folley
Read the full article from The Hill, here.
President Biden is attempting to thread the needle by replacing a lapsed federal eviction ban with new protections designed to keep millions of Americans from losing their homes amid surging coronavirus cases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday night imposed a new, narrower moratorium to replace the one that expired Sunday. But there are already questions about the legality of the order.
The CDC said it is prohibiting evictions in counties with high rates of COVID-19 transmission through Oct. 3, aligning with areas where the agency has asked Americans to wear masks in public indoor settings even if vaccinated. The ban is expected to cover 90 percent of the U.S. population and 80 percent of counties.
By Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
With a surge of Covid-19 infections ripping through much of the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has accelerated its timetable to fully approve the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, aiming to complete the process by the start of next month, people familiar with the effort said.
President Biden said last week that he expected a fully approved vaccine in early fall. But the F.D.A.’s unofficial deadline is Labor Day or sooner, according to several people familiar with the plan. The agency said in a statement that its leaders recognized that approval might increase public confidence and had “taken an all-hands-on-deck approach” to the work.
By Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
The U.S. economy is heading toward an increasingly uncertain autumn as a surge in the Delta variant of the coronavirus coincides with the expiration of expanded unemployment benefits for millions of people, complicating what was supposed to be a return to normal as a wave of workers re-entered the labor market.
That dynamic is creating an unexpected challenge for the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve in managing what has been a fairly swift recovery from a recession. For months, officials at the White House and the central bank have pointed toward the fall as a potential turning point for an economy that is struggling to fully shake off the effects of the pandemic — particularly in the job market, which remains millions of positions below prepandemic levels.
By Apoorva Mandavilli
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the agency, acknowledged on Tuesday that vaccinated people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant carry just as much virus in the nose and throat as unvaccinated people, and may spread it just as readily, if less often.
But the internal document lays out a broader and even grimmer view of the variant.
The Delta variant is more transmissible than the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and it is as contagious as chickenpox, according to the document, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
By Jason DeParle
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
The number of poor Americans is expected to fall by nearly 20 million from 2018 levels, a decline of almost 45 percent. The country has never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time, and the development is especially notable since it defies economic headwinds — the economy has nearly seven million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.
The extraordinary reduction in poverty has come at extraordinary cost, with annual spending on major programs projected to rise fourfold to more than $1 trillion. Yet without further expensive new measures, millions of families may find the escape from poverty brief. The three programs that cut poverty most — stimulus checks, increased food stamps and expanded unemployment insurance — have ended or are scheduled to soon revert to their prepandemic size.
By Jason DeParle
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
The number of poor Americans is expected to fall by nearly 20 million from 2018 levels, a decline of almost 45 percent. The country has never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time, and the development is especially notable since it defies economic headwinds — the economy has nearly seven million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.
The extraordinary reduction in poverty has come at extraordinary cost, with annual spending on major programs projected to rise fourfold to more than $1 trillion. Yet without further expensive new measures, millions of families may find the escape from poverty brief. The three programs that cut poverty most — stimulus checks, increased food stamps and expanded unemployment insurance — have ended or are scheduled to soon revert to their prepandemic size.
By Phil McCausland
Read the full article from NBC News, here.
Advocates and experts have particularly celebrated the 15 percent increase in maximum funding for people receiving the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefit, or SNAP, commonly called food stamps. Once fearful that conservatives and the Trump administration would add work requirements to the benefit, they now warn that the padded benefit is scheduled to expire at the end of September and are pushing to make it permanent.
Many consider SNAP to be the backbone of the fight to address hunger in the U.S. but complain about the formula that calculates the amount of money hungry Americans get, especially with rising food costs and needs.
Without the expansion, the national average of the SNAP benefit per meal came to $1.97, even though the average meal cost was around $2.41, according to an analysis released this week by the Urban Institute, an economic and social policy think tank. SNAP’s maximum benefit last year without the expansion passed by Congress came up short of low-income meal costs in 96 percent of U.S. counties.