New California covid restrictions are coming soon, governor says

With a covid-19 vaccine around the corner, Facebook will step up its efforts to remove false claims about vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts, the company said Thursday.

The company says it will remove false claims that could include misinformation about the safety, efficacy, ingredients, or side effects of the vaccines. It will also remove specific conspiracy theories, such as baseless claims that vaccines contain microchips or that certain populations will be forced to be vaccinated.

The company already prohibits misinformation related to the coronavirus, as well as advertising opposing vaccinations, so most false claims about vaccines would already have effectively been prohibited on both Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.

LONDON — Sophisticated hackers, assumed to be state agents, have been carrying out a global phishing campaign targeting the vital “cold chain” that will protect coronavirus vaccines during storage and transport, IBM security researchers reported on Thursday.

The IBM team said the “precision targeting of executives and key global organizations hold the potential hallmarks of a nation-state tradecraft.”

The hackers took measures to hide their tracks, and the cyber-sleuths did not name which state might be behind the campaign.

The IBM team said it was not known why the hackers were trying to penetrate the systems. It suggested the intruders might either want to steal information, glean details about technology or contracts, create confusion and distrust, or to disrupt the vaccine supply chains themselves.

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In one of the most isolating years of recent history, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci is very, very alone — if you don’t count his wife and a swarm of federal agents to protect him from harassing and threatening fanatics.

“They drive me to work, they stay here, they make sure that nobody tries to break in [to my home] and, as Steve Bannon would like, have somebody behead me,” Fauci told HuffPost of the agents, referencing the violent diatribe that got the former Trump strategist banned from Twitter.

“I don’t socialize,” Fauci continued. “It’s my wife and I and the federal agents. We’ve sort of become like a new family unit.”

Fauci told HuffPost that he didn’t even see his adult children for Thanksgiving — following his own guidance to avoid gathering with family and friends (although record travel figures hint that maybe not everyone took that advice to heart).

He also steers clear of taking public transit and running errands, avoiding catching the virus he is tasked with fighting.

“One, because nobody wants to get infected, but two, I really have an important job that I’d hate to be laid up for because I got infected,” he said.

Despite the solitude, Fauci’s 18-hour workdays are jam-packed with interviews with journalists, meetings with other doctors and speeches to the masses. His breaks are often filled with corralling his email inbox: After the thousand-plus emails he receives daily are screened, he’s still left with a “few hundred,” he told the news outlet.

“It’s just, you know, drinking out of a fire hose trying to keep ahead of everything that’s going on,” he said.

Ahead of the anticipated distribution of Moderna’s two-dose vaccine and a similar vaccine developed by Pfizer and German biotechnology company BioNTech, which could be coming in a matter of weeks, experts have stressed the importance of transparent messaging in ensuring wide public acceptance and completion of the vaccination regimens.

Though a full detailed analysis of the safety profile of the vaccines is forthcoming and will be a topic of discussion at the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee meetings this month, the drugmakers’ disclosures about the possible side effects coupled with anecdotal reports from trial participants have prompted concern among some experts that people may be hesitant to get vaccinated or won’t come back for their second dose.

“We talk about these vaccines as being reactogenic, which is just a big word that means the way they work, you will feel that they’re working,” said Kelly Moore of the Immunization Action Coalition, who is also an external adviser for Pfizer’s vaccine effort.

“So, it will give a reaction, and that reaction may be a sore arm or some redness where the injection was given. Or you may even feel flu-like, you may have a headache or body aches for a day or so, and it’s absolutely normal. There’s nothing dangerous or bad about these reactions.”

As the nation counts new records for confirmed cases and current hospitalizations — now nearly 101,000 — it surpassed another morbid marker as of Thursday: The national death toll has exceeded 2,500 for the past three days, for the first time. The last deadliest stretch for the country was in April.

Thursday’s toll of 2,753 comes as the surges in infections and hospitalizations, typically precursors for more deaths, are expected to only grow further following the Thanksgiving weekend.

In more than 30 states, lives lost to the virus are on the rise over the past week, while infections have climbed in about half the country during the same time.

Fifteen states averaged new highs for their daily case counts over the past week, and 13 states did the same for deaths. Kentucky was the only state to be counted among both less-than-desirable lists.

In recent days, the United States has increasingly hit or approached new highs for daily cases and Thursday was no different, with 212,906 reported infections. The previous record was set only the day before.

With few options left, overwhelmed doctors and other caregivers are appealing directly to governors for relief from the staggering increases in hospitalized covid-19 patients as the virus surges across the country.

In Connecticut, Tennessee, Missouri and Mississippi, physicians have issued unusually public pleas for stronger responses to the pandemic as hospitals and their staffs near a breaking point. The number of hospitalized covid-19 patients surpassed 100,000 on Wednesday, placing enormous strain on the nation’s acute care hospitals, where there are roughly 730,000 beds.

The efforts have achieved little in the way of tangible relief so far, and in one case drew a rebuke from Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R).

The Rev. Marlin Lavanhar has spent months praying with his Tulsa congregation for the victims of covid-19. Tuning in to socially distant Sunday services on Facebook, Zoom and Roku, he says, members share the names of sick people for whom they want to light candles — and donate to a collection for all those going hungry as jobs disappear.

So Lavanhar was unimpressed when Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) declared Thursday a “day of prayer and fasting” for those affected by the pandemic. He says he wants action — starting with a statewide mask mandate.

Stitt’s announcement drew a scathing backlash from critics seeking more stringent measures to slow the spread of the virus, rallying support for the mask mandates that have gained increasingly bipartisan traction around the country. Many ridiculed the governor’s announcement online.