CDC committee to meet on Moderna, J&J boosters

The sheriff of Los Angeles County says he will not require staff in his agency to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, despite a county order that mandated all county employees be fully vaccinated by Oct. 1.

“I don’t want to be in a position to lose 5, 10% of my workforce overnight on a vaccine mandate,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva said Wednesday during a Facebook Live event.

He said he couldn’t afford to lose staff over the mandate and that “the issue has become so politicized there are entire groups of employees that are willing to be fired and laid off rather than get vaccinated.”

For the past two months, the Internet has been a graveyard of stories about unvaccinated deaths, which make up the majority of the pandemic’s current victims. News outlets, The Washington Post included, track down cautionary tales — the new mother who got to hold her baby only once, the husband and wife who died two weeks apart, the young and healthy athlete struck down in his prime, the autistic 28-year-old — and record their family’s sorrow. The narrative is even more potent when the victim expresses a dying wish for others to get vaccinated, and regrets their decision not to.

Michael McCarthy was headed to his weekly walk in Sligo Avenue Neighborhood Park one August morning, when he noticed two rocks at the base of his car’s rear tires.

“When I got in my car and started it, it sounded like a 747 aircraft without the windows. It was this loud, offensive noise, and I turned the engine off right away,” McCarthy said. “I didn’t know what to think, but something was wrong.”

McCarthy, 77, soon discovered that he was one of a growing number of car owners regionally and nationwide who have lost their catalytic converters, an integral part of a vehicle’s exhaust system that police say thieves are targeting for its precious metals.

Craig Saffoe, curator of the great cats at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, had warned his staff in advance that Shera, the African lion, might not pull through.

She had been infected with covid-19’s highly contagious delta variant. She was lethargic. She wouldn’t eat or drink. And her kidneys were failing.

As the 335-pound animal lay anesthetized on the floor of her enclosure, with a stomach tube down her throat and an intravenous line in a blood vessel for fluids, there seemed to be little improvement.

The U.S. economy added just 194,000 jobs in September, the Department of Labor reported Friday, a disappointing month that reflects how severely the delta variant is hampering the economic recovery.

The unemployment rate dropped to 4.8 percent from 5.2 percent in August, although that was mostly from people leaving the labor force.

During more optimistic days, September was supposed to be a big month for the labor market, with widespread coronavirus vaccinations, falling caseloads and the return of normal functions like in-person schooling allowing the economy to rev back up. The country is still about 5 million jobs below where it was before the pandemic, and needs to gain back an even bigger number to stage a full recovery.

Moderna said Friday that it aims to provide 1 billion doses of its coronavirus vaccine to low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2022, in addition to the shots it pledged to Covax, the World Health Organization-backed initiative to distribute vaccine doses equitably.

The announcement comes a day after The Washington Post reported that tensions between the Biden administration and the biotechnology company flared during discussions about ramping up domestic and international production to help meet global needs.

What if Florida and Texas had vaccinated their residents at the same rate as New England states did?

The two Sun Belt states, among the hardest-hit during the delta surge, fell behind the Northeastern states, including Vermont, Connecticut and Maine, in getting shots into arms.

About 58 and 52 percent of residents in Florida and Texas are vaccinated, respectively. If they had reached the New England states’ average of 74 percent fully vaccinated, they could have collectively prevented more than 95,000 hospitalizations and 22,000 deaths, according to an analysis in the Lancet.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory panel will meet Oct. 20 and 21 to discuss coronavirus boosters for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, respectively.

The timing of the meetings suggests that the Food and Drug Administration will have decided before then to authorize the boosters and the mixing and matching of the three coronavirus vaccines. Typically, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices makes recommendations on vaccine use only after regulatory clearance by the FDA.