Coronavirus live updates: Biden administration’s latest pro-vaccine push features TV ads, grass-roots leaders
Here are some significant developments:
- New data from the ongoing trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has reinforced early results showing its high efficacy, and there are indications it is effective against the more-virulent variant first identified in South Africa.
- The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention again urged Americans not to let their guards down, noting a 12 percent increase in the seven-day average for new coronavirus cases and rising hospitalizations.
- Johnson & Johnson acknowledged that a Baltimore plant run by Emergent BioSolutions mixed up two vaccines’ ingredients for a batch of doses, estimated at about 15 million, that had to be discarded.
- Peter Navarro urged then-President Donald Trump to acquire critical medical supplies in the early days of the outbreak — and after the warning was ignored, pursued an ad hoc billion-dollar strategy that has since prompted multiple probes.
- France announced a new national lockdown, the most severe since last spring, for the next four weeks, amid spiking cases and a slow vaccine rollout.
- More than 30 million cases have been reported domestically, while the total number of fatalities in the United States reached 552,000. Nearly 98 million people have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine in the United States.
