Covid-19 live updates Fully vaccinated U.S. citizens are low-risk to travel, CDC says

At a political forum on Wednesday, GOP congressional candidate Sery Kim falsely suggested that Chinese immigrants bring the coronavirus to the United States — and suggested that she opposes their entry to the country.

“I don’t want them here at all,” Kim, who is Korean American, told attendees, speaking of Chinese immigrants and China in general, the Dallas Morning News reported. “They steal our intellectual property, they give us coronavirus, they don’t hold themselves accountable.”

Kim, 42, also argued that a rising surge in violence and threats against Asian Americans has been trumped up by the media, saying that “Asians have always faced violence. It’s not worse than before.”

Giant pharmacies in D.C. now have more coronavirus vaccine doses stockpiled than arms to put them in, a spokesman for the company said Friday — and the company has temporarily stopped ordering more doses from the federal government while it waits for the District to increase the appointments the city schedules at its stores.

“We have more than we can give out at the moment,” Giant spokesman Daniel Wolk said.

While residents can schedule their own appointments at Giant stores in some states, the grocery chain does not offer that option in the District, instead scheduling patients exclusively through the city’s registration portal. Wolk praised the city’s centralized system as fair and efficient; D.C. aims to avoid the headaches that residents in other states have encountered, checking multiple providers’ websites at all hours of the day.

When Laura Forman arrived at work a few weeks ago, something was missing. The refrigerated truck for bodies that had overflowed Kent Hospital’s morgue during the covid-19 surge was gone.

“Coming up to the hospital and seeing that space where it had been, I cried,” said Forman, the physician who heads the Warwick, R.I., hospital’s emergency department. “It was the most powerful symbol of hope.”

But this week, hope gave way, yet again, to concern. The rate of coronavirus infections is rising again — in Rhode Island and across the nation. It is clouding the success of the U.S. vaccination program, at least for now.

After a year of bad news, travelers finally have something to look forward to again. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave the green light that fully vaccinated people can travel again.

The long-awaited guidance is welcome news for travelers who want to visit family and take vacations for the first time in more than a year.

But even though nearly 100 million Americans have had at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, we are not out of the woods yet. Officials are still not recommending travel for everyone due to the rising number of cases in the United States and globally.

When we venture out again, travel will not look the same as it did in 2019.

AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine has a new name in Europe: Vaxzevria.

Until now, recipients had to call it by the drug company’s name. If they were feeling wordier, they might add “Oxford,” since researchers from that university helped create it. But there was no catchy brand name to use either to praise it for helping bring Britain’s spiraling pandemic under control, or to worry about the rare blood clots that some people may have developed after being inoculated.

An AstraZeneca spokeswoman said the new brand name had been planned for months, suggesting that the change had nothing to do with the vaccine’s bumpy rollout. The European Union has complained that AstraZeneca delivered just a third of what it promised since the beginning of the year, and some countries have suspended its use as they investigate the blood clotting issues.

The spokeswoman, Kim Blomley, did not explain in an emailed response to a request for comment what the brand name was intended to evoke or whether the company intended to use the same name in the U.S. market if the vaccine wins U.S. approval, which is still in process. Oddly, the name “Zevria” was trademarked in the United States by AstraZeneca rival Pfizer in 2003, then abandoned the following year.

The brand name may not ultimately hold much significance. Pfizer’s vaccine is technically called Comirnaty in the E.U., but few people would recognize that name.

Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease specialist, said Friday he tries to ignore attacks by some members of Congress but responded with a mild zinger that compared progress against the coronavirus during the Biden and Trump administrations.

Answering a question during Friday’s media briefing, Fauci said efforts to tarnish him are “a reflection … I guess, of concern about what we’re doing now, compared to what was done before.” Fauci also served on the task force under Trump but was eventually sidelined by the president in favor of other advisers who more closely agreed with Trump’s positions on the pandemic.

Friday’s question, which noted that Fauci has recently “been vilified by certain members of Congress,” appeared to refer to a bill introduced Thursday by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to lower Fauci’s salary to zero or fire him. Forbes has reported that Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, earned more than $417,000 in 2019, making him the highest-paid public official in the federal government. Greene pegged Fauci’s salary at more than $434,000.

In February, the House stripped Greene of her committee posts over extremist positions she has supported, including adherence to the violent and baseless assertions of the group QAnon.

The 80-year-old Fauci, who polls show is one of the nation’s most trusted officials on the pandemic, said he deals with attacks “by trying to the best of my ability to not pay attention to it. … If I start worrying about the slings and arrows that get thrown at me, it would be a distraction. And I tend to not want to be distracted. That’s how I deal with it.”

Federal health officials gave the green light Friday for fully vaccinated people to resume travel as an estimated 100 million Americans have had at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, and evidence mounts of the shots’ effectiveness.

The long-awaited guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is welcome news for the growing number of vaccinated adults who want greater freedom to visit family members and take vacations for the first time in a year. It is also expected to help boost the travel and airline industries that have been seeking a relaxation of restrictions. Until Friday’s announcement, officials were still discouraging people who had been fully vaccinated from traveling.

The agency updated its guidance because of several newly released studies documenting the strong real-world effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines in protecting against infection and spread of the virus, and the rapid pace of vaccinations, now close to 3 million people a day.

Europe headed into its second locked-down Easter weekend on Friday amid fears that family gatherings could fuel a growing new wave of coronavirus infections with vaccinations still lagging.

European societies tend to be more secular than the United States — but many countries still take Good Friday and Easter Monday as national holidays, giving citizens a four-day vacation and a chance to gather with families. This year, leaders are balancing fears of spiraling infections with demands from exhausted populations who are struggling after a year of on-and-off lockdowns.

The result has been a chaos of contradictions, with policymakers tightening restrictions but also suggesting that they will turn a blind eye to people who violate the rules to take a break.

In France, a new national lockdown will take effect Saturday, with hospitals filling anew with an ever-younger cohort of people suffering from covid-19. French residents will be banned from traveling more than six miles from their homes without sworn declarations that they meet a limited number of exceptions. But President Emmanuel Macron said that authorities would extend “tolerance” to people traveling farther during the holiday weekend.

In Germany and Italy, there are tight limits on who can gather, and Italians are not allowed to move around inside their country. But leaders of both countries have allowed citizens to travel abroad, prompting concern that people will spread infections abroad or bring them home afterward.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had an especially tortured lead-up to the Easter weekend, agreeing with regional leaders last week to impose a strict holiday-weekend lockdown before reversing course, apologizing but continuing to tell citizens to be careful.

“It should be a quiet Easter, with those closest to you,” Merkel said Thursday.