Biden touts work on pandemic, calls it ‘a job not yet finished’

The first weekend of D.C.'s new vaccination requirement to enter bars, restaurants and other indoor businesses ended with only one business citywide reported for allegedly not enforcing the rule.

The mandate, which requires patrons of indoor businesses to show proof of vaccination and matching identification, went into effect Saturday for sit-down restaurants, bars, gyms, theaters and most other public places where people spend long periods sitting inside. Grocery stores, retail stores and houses of worship are among the exempt locations.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said at a news conference Tuesday that the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration (ABRA) was in charge of enforcing the mandate among businesses with liquor licenses, a group that includes most restaurants and bars.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said Wednesday that President Biden’s effort to send 500 million coronavirus rapid tests to Americans was diverting orders already placed for such tests by Maryland and other states.

During a news conference after his annual budget announcement, Hogan said Maryland had ordered millions of rapid tests and was expecting “a huge shipment” this week. But, he said, “all of our vendors called us late Friday to say that the White House’s announcement on Friday had frozen all the orders and that they were taking all of the tests that were going to go to us and the other states.”

White House officials rejected Hogan’s assertion Wednesday, saying that its testing contracts prohibit the companies from taking tests away from state and local governments.

Hogan said he and governors from both major political parties expressed their supply concerns in a call with the White House on Tuesday. The Biden administration’s plan to mail tests, Hogan said, didn’t produce new tests. “They just took all the tests off the shelf that we were supposed to get on trucks to come here,” he said.

White House officials rebuffed those assertions.

Doctors told Anne Quiner last week that — over her vehement objections — they would take her husband off the ventilator she believed was keeping him alive. They planned to do it at noon two days later.

Quiner had about 48 hours to save her husband and would need almost all of them.

The next day, she sued Mercy Hospital, where doctors in the Coon Rapids, Minn., ICU had been treating her 55-year-old husband, Scott Quiner, for covid-19 for more than two months, according to court documents and a GoFundMe page set up to raise money for his medical care.

Her plea was simple: “Absent an Order from the court restraining Defendant Mercy hospital from turning off the ventilator, my husband will die.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) on Wednesday announced that all workers in the state’s health-care and “high-risk” settings will be required to be fully vaccinated and boosted, without a testing-out option.

“We are no longer going to look past those who continue to put their colleagues and … those who are their responsibility in danger of covid,” Murphy said in a news conference. “That has to stop.”

The move comes as the option for health-care workers to get tested in lieu of vaccination is set to expire because of a Biden administration federal mandate — which was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Murphy’s executive order adds a booster requirement.

According to the order, unvaccinated health-care workers have until Jan. 27 to receive their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. They must be fully immunized by Feb. 28. Murphy said employees in “high-risk congregant settings” — such as correctional facilities and nursing homes — must get their first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, or the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, by Feb. 28 and their second by March 30. After the two-dose regimen is completed and six months have passed, people will have three weeks to receive a booster.

Workers who are eligible but have not yet received the booster face the same deadlines — Feb. 28 for those in health care, and March 30 for those in nursing homes, prisons or jails.

Those who do not comply may lose their jobs, Murphy said.

New Jersey’s caseload is leveling off after “an omicron tsunami” washed across the state, Murphy said. Still, the latest month’s numbers, he said, are among the highest since the pandemic began. With a seven-day average of 15,743 new daily cases, infections have fallen by 42 percent compared with last week, data from The Post’s covid-19 tracker shows. About 5,240 people with covid are hospitalized in the state.

After recovering from a coronavirus infection that left him feeling “extremely unwell,” West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) on Wednesday made a plea to his state’s residents: “You’ve got to get vaccinated, and you’ve got to get boosted — I mean, that’s all there is to it.”

Justice, 70, recounted his experience with the virus at a Wednesday coronavirus briefing. After testing positive Jan. 12, Justice said he had a cough, a fever and elevated blood pressure and heart rate. Monoclonal antibody treatments helped alleviate his symptoms, he said, but it was his fully vaccinated status that ultimately “saved” his life.

“I know without anybody telling me in any way, if I hadn’t been vaccinated, I would’ve been in the hospital for sure, and I would’ve been in a really tough shape — really, really tough shape,” he said. “So stack the deck in your favor.”

West Virginia’s seven-day average of 4,161 reported cases — an 18 percent increase since last week, according to The Washington Post’s covid-19 tracker — is its highest count of the pandemic. The state has the country’s third-oldest population, with 20 percent of its 1.79 million residents over age 65, according to census data. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity — all covid-19 comorbidities.

Justice said Wednesday that 5,576 have died of the coronavirus-caused disease in his state.

New treatment guidelines from the National Institutes of Health discourage the use of two of the three monoclonal antibody treatments authorized for early-stage covid-19 because the therapies probably will not work against the omicron variant.

The updated guidelines, posted Wednesday, reflect new estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the variant is dominant in all regions of the United States and is responsible for 99.5 percent of cases.

The NIH treatment guidance panel said the therapies by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly “are predicted to have markedly reduced activities” against the omicron variant and that “real-time testing to identify rare, non-omicron variants is not routinely available.”

The group continued to recommend a third monoclonal antibody, called sotrovimab. That medication is made by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology.

In late December, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would pause shipments of the Regeneron and Lilly drugs because tests indicated they were not effective against omicron.

In early January, the administration resumed shipments of those medications, saying it was responding to requests from some states and doctors. That action followed complaints from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) that the federal government was cutting off access to the Regeneron treatment, which he said could still be helpful.

In an email Wednesday, DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw said a small percentage of cases in Florida are caused by the delta variant and should respond to all three monoclonal antibody treatments.

A spokeswoman for HHS’s assistant secretary of preparedness and response, who is in charge of distributing the treatments, did not respond to a question about whether the government will stop making the Regeneron and Lilly therapies available to states. She referred a reporter to the department’s website.

Administration officials previously said they would frequently assess whether to continue to make all three treatments available.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has sued two coronavirus testing businesses that allegedly failed to deliver test results and falsified negative results in the first major legal action against companies that in recent weeks have been the subject of scores of consumer complaints nationwide.

The Center for COVID Control LLC and Doctors Clinical Laboratory Inc., both Illinois-based companies, engaged in “deceptive and misleading practices” that violate Minnesota’s consumer protection laws, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Hennepin County. The companies advertised free coronavirus testing, in the form of rapid antigen tests and the more sensitive PCR tests, but in some cases never delivered the lab results; in other instances, Ellison’s office said, test results were falsified or inaccurate.

Though the tests were provided to customers for free, the companies sought reimbursement for the tests from customers’ insurance companies or federal agencies for uninsured customers; Doctors Clinical Laboratory alone has billed the federal government more than $113 million for covid-19 tests administered to uninsured patients throughout the country, including in Minnesota, the complaint says.

Here’s what to know about the top coronavirus stories around the globe.

• The Czech Republic’s new government on Wednesday dismissed the previous government’s plan to require adults 60 and over and people in some professions to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
• Doctors and medical workers in Poland fear that the country’s health-care system might not be able to cope with the latest surge of coronavirus infections. More than 30,000 new cases in 24 hours were reported Wednesday, and health authorities are expecting the figure to almost double in the next week.
• Germany surpassed 100,000 daily coronavirus cases for the first time, as France hit a pandemic high with nearly half a million infections recorded in 24 hours in a surge fueled by the omicron variant.
• Brazil, where omicron has become the dominant variant, also reported a daily record, with 137,103 new cases.
• Japan stepped up restrictions in the capital, Tokyo, and other regions, covering about half the population in an effort to contain a rise in infections.
• Fewer than 10 percent of people in Africa have received their first vaccine shots, while half the global population has been immunized, World Health Organization officials announced.