President Biden said Friday that coronavirus booster shots for millions of Americans who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will begin immediately and urged those eligible for a third shot to get one quickly to fortify their protection to the dangerous Delta variant that swept through the country this summer.
Mr. Biden spoke just hours after the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially endorsed a Pfizer booster for older adults, many people with underlying health conditions, and frontline workers — like teachers and nurses — whose jobs put them at higher risk of contracting the disease.
People in those categories can get a booster if they received their second dose of the vaccine more than six months ago, Mr. Biden said.
“My message today is this: If you’ve got the Pfizer vaccine, you got the Pfizer vaccine in January, February, March of this year, and you’re over 65 years of age, go get the booster,” he said. “Or, if you’re in a have a medical condition like diabetes, or you’re a frontline worker like a health care worker or a teacher, you can get a free booster.”
Early Friday morning, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, overruled a recommendation by her agency’s panel of scientific advisers that had refused to endorse booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for frontline workers. Dr. Walensky’s highly unusual move aligned C.D.C. policy with the Food and Drug Administration’s endorsements over her own agency’s advisers.
The C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Thursday recommended the boosters for a wide range of Americans, including tens of millions of older adults, and younger people at high risk for the disease. But they excluded health care workers, teachers and others whose jobs put them at risk. That put their recommendations at odds with the F.D.A.’s authorization of booster shots for all adults with a high occupational risk.
Dr. Walensky’s decision bolstered Mr. Biden’s campaign to give a broad segment of Americans access to boosters. The White House had come under criticism for getting ahead of the regulatory process. The C.D.C. panel was not asked to judge whether people who received the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines should receive the additional doses, which have not been authorized by the F.D.A.
The advisers also wrestled with the practicalities of endorsing a booster shot for only Pfizer-BioNTech recipients, when close to half of vaccinated Americans have received Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
Moderna’s booster authorization may arrive in a few days to weeks. The company has applied to the F.D.A. for authorization of a booster shot carrying half the dosage given in the first two shots, which has complicated the agency’s deliberations.
Some global health experts have criticized the Biden administration for pushing booster shots when much of the world has yet to receive a first dose. But analysts noted that even if the United States distributes booster shots, there should still be considerable excess vaccine supply this year, and they urged the government to begin sending the extra doses abroad.
In his remarks, Mr. Biden complained again about the resistance to the vaccine.
“It’s caused by the fact that despite Americans having an unprecedented and successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months free vaccines have been available in 80,000 locations, we still have over 70 million Americans who fail to get a single shot,” he said. “And to make matters worse, there are elected officials actively working to undermine with false information the fight against Covid-19.”
“This is totally unacceptable,” he said.
War-torn Yemen, where the overwhelming majority of the population is unvaccinated, is seeing coronavirus cases multiply and deaths soar, according to a report this week by the charity Oxfam.
Oxfam, which describes itself as a global anti-poverty and humanitarian group, found that Covid deaths had increased by more than fivefold in the past month and that recorded Covid cases had tripled. The charity said actual figures were likely to be much higher, with many unregistered cases and deaths.
The official Covid death toll is about 1,658, and recorded cases have reached 8,789. But the situation in the country of about 30 million is hard to gauge. “Countless” others have died in their homes or have not been diagnosed because of scarce tests and hospital beds, Oxfam said.
Yemen is still embroiled in a war that began in 2014 when Iran-backed rebels know as the Houthis seized the country’s northwest, including the capital, Sana, sending the government into exile. The government has effectively collapsed, and tens of thousands have died.
The country already faced many health challenges before the coronavirus emerged. Hunger is widespread, medicines are hard to find and there have been outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.
The pandemic has only exacerbated the situation, and rights groups say that it is adding to the burden of an already wrecked health care system.
“Covid has made life even worse for people across the country,” Abdulwasea Mohammed, Oxfam’s policy and advocacy lead for Yemen, said by phone from Sana.
Some relief could come with vaccines, but fewer than 1 percent of Yemenis have so far received a single vaccine dose, and only 0.05 percent are fully vaccinated, according to Oxfam.
The country is relying on vaccines from the global Covax program. But Covax is struggling to meet its global supply target, and only half a million out of a promised 4.2 million doses have reached Yemen so far, Oxfam said.
Few isolation centers exist for Covid patients. The ones that are operating are found only in major cities like the capital Sana, and they are overflowing with people, Mr. Mohammed said. The poorly equipped hospitals are also seeing more people than they can accommodate. And many Yemenis cannot afford transportation to health care facilities.
With half the population having lost their source of income, staying at home means possibly dying of hunger for many Yemenis who have become day earners, Mr. Mohammed said. But appearing to be sick means being shunned, so if they have mild symptoms, people are reluctant to seek medical care or testing for the virus at the very few testing centers available.
In shelters that host over 4 million internally displaced people, a family of 10 is likely to share one small tent, making precautionary measures impossible.
“The country is not able to cope with another health crisis,” Mr. Mohammed said.
Most Yemenis survive on humanitarian aid, which Oxfam says has been in short supply. Only half of a $3.9 billion essential aid package requested by the United Nations from donor countries has been received. The health care system is dangerously underfunded, working with only 11 percent of what it needs, the organization says.
Some had hoped that the pandemic would force Yemen’s warring parties into a truce, but the war continues.
“If anything, it is amazing how little the pandemic has affected the fighting,” said Peter Salisbury, a senior analyst on Yemen for the International Crisis Group, in an interview.
The terror and uncertainty of the war, which has forced people to deal with loss on a daily basis for years, remains a larger concern for many Yemenis than the pandemic itself. “This speaks to the trauma of the conflict,” Mr. Salisbury said.
Alaska, once a leader in vaccinating its citizens, is now in the throes of its worst coronavirus surge of the pandemic, as the Delta variant rips through the state, swamping hospitals with patients.
As of Thursday, the state was averaging 125 new cases a day for every 100,000 people, more than any other in the nation, according to recent data trends collected by The New York Times. That figure has shot up by 42 percent in the last two weeks, and by more than twentyfold since early July.
On Wednesday, the state said it had activated “crisis standards of care,” giving hospitals legal protections for triage decisions that force them to give some patients substandard care. The state also announced an $87 million contract to bring in hundreds of temporary health care workers.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, said that while hospitals were strained, he did not see a need to implement restrictions aimed at curbing transmission. Still, he encouraged people who had not yet received a vaccination to seriously consider it.
“We have the tools available to us for individuals to be able to take care of themselves,” Mr. Dunleavy said. While the state led the nation in vaccinations early in the year, it has been lagging in recent months, with under half of its population fully vaccinated, compared with 55 percent nationally, according to federal data.
Jared Kosin, the head of the Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association, called the surge “crippling” in an interview on Tuesday. He added that hospitals were full, and health care workers were emotionally depleted. Patients recently were kept waiting for care in their cars outside overwhelmed emergency rooms.
There is growing anxiety in outlying communities that depend on transferring seriously ill patients to hospitals in Anchorage, Mr. Kosin said. Transfers are getting harder to arrange and are often delayed, he said.
“We are all wondering where this goes, and whether that transfer will be available, even tomorrow,” Mr. Kosin said.
Critically ill people in rural areas, where many Alaska Natives reside, often have to be taken by plane to a hospital that can provide the treatment they need, said Dr. Philippe Amstislavski, an associate professor of public health at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
“Unlike in the lower 48, you don’t have that ability to move people quickly, because of the distances and remoteness,” said Dr. Amstislavski, who was formerly the public health manager for the Interior Region of Alaska, focusing on rural and predominantly Alaska Native communities.
Mr. Kosin said that if hospitalizations rise much further, hospitals and clinics around the state could be forced to apply crisis standards of care and more extreme triage decisions. “That is the worst-case scenario we could be heading to,” he said.
Alaska Natives, who have historically suffered from health disparities in the state, are disproportionately struggling during the latest virus wave, Dr. Amstislavski said.
Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, said several factors may be contributing to the surge, including summer tourists bringing in and spreading the virus.
“We’re hoping that as the snow falls and we have less people visiting, those numbers will settle down,” Dr. Zink said in an interview Tuesday night.
On the other hand, she noted that cooling weather drives residents indoors, where the virus spreads more readily.
The state’s Canadian neighbors to the east, Yukon and British Columbia, have not suffered such severe outbreaks, Dr. Amstislavski said, possibly because of that country’s stricter travel restrictions and less strained health care system.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday overruled a recommendation by an agency advisory panel that had refused to endorse booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for frontline workers. It was a highly unusual move for the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, but aligned C.D.C. policy with the Food and Drug Administration’s endorsements over her own agency’s advisers.
The C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Thursday recommended the boosters for a wide range of Americans, including tens of millions of older adults and younger people at high risk for the disease. But they excluded health care workers, teachers and others whose jobs put them at risk. That put their recommendations at odds with the F.D.A.’s authorization of booster shots for all adults with a high occupational risk.
Dr. Walensky’s decision was a boost for President Biden’s campaign to give a broad swathe of Americans access to boosters. The White House had come under criticism for getting ahead of the regulatory process.
The C.D.C.’s statement arrived well past midnight, a sign of the complicated and confusing decision-making surrounding the boosters. The C.D.C. advisers similarly spent two days debating who should get boosters and when, and could not agree on whether occupational risk should qualify as a criterion.
“I am surprised that Dr. Walensky overturned one of the four A.C.I.P. votes today, and I believe others will be as well,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease expert at Stanford and the American Academy of Pediatrics liaison to the committee.
But the vote on boosters for occupational risk “was close,” Dr. Maldonado said, and agreed with Dr. Walensky’s decision.
“This addresses not only waning immunity but those at high risk of exposure,” Dr. Maldonado added.
Minutes before Dr. Walensky’s statement, Dr. Amanda Cohn, who oversaw the two-day meeting of the panel, tried to prepare the advisers for the director’s decision.
“Dr. Walensky is reversing the decision to not recommend use of a booster dose in persons at high risk for occupational or institutional exposure,” Dr. Cohn wrote in the email. “I am hoping to share this news with you before you see it in the press.”
Dr. Walensky’s decision to go against her own agency’s advisers came as a surprise to at least some of her staff members: The C.D.C. director’s endorsement of the advisory committee’s recommendations is typically just a formality. Hours before her statement, agency insiders predicted she would stick with the usual protocol because doing otherwise would undermine the process and upset the advisers as well as her own staff.
But experts outside the C.D.C. said Dr. Walensky may have had no choice but to align herself with the F.D.A.’s decision. “There’s a complexity here, because Dr. Walensky was part of the White House announcement” on boosters, noted Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Dr. Walensky said providing booster shots to health care workers and others who risk contracting the disease on the job would “best serve the nation’s public health needs.”
SEOUL — South Korea reported its highest number of new coronavirus infections for a single day on Friday, soon after a long holiday weekend.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported 2,434 new infections, surpassing the previous record of 2,221 infections set last month.
At a briefing on Friday, health officials said the spike was partly because of the Chuseok holiday, when many people traveled across the country and spent time with friends and family. The government is encouraging people to get tested following the holiday.
Chuseok is roughly equivalent to American Thanksgiving and was observed from Monday through Wednesday. The Korea Transport Institute estimated that over 32 million people would travel over the holiday.
Over the past week the nation was averaging about 1,500 new cases a day, according to statistics collected by Our World in Data. Most cases are concentrated in the capital, Seoul, and surrounding areas, but officials were concerned that the holiday would spread the virus more widely.
Testing and quarantining were the main tools South Korea used to curb the spread of the disease, and the country was able to keep outbreaks at bay in the early part of the pandemic.
South Korea’s vaccination program got off to a slow start, but the country has now vaccinated 43 percent of its population. It hopes to have 70 percent of its population inoculated by October.
“There is no problem at all with the amount of vaccines secured for this year,” President Moon Jae-in said on Friday, according to Reuters. “The vaccine shipment got off to a slower start than other countries, which delayed the vaccination program, but I believe by next month, we will catch up and be a leading country by inoculation rate.”
A few weeks ago the government relaxed several restrictions on in-person meetings. For Chuseok, family gatherings of up to eight people were permitted if at least four people were fully vaccinated.
Hospitals near a grocery store shooting in Collierville, Tenn., were already struggling to keep up with Covid-19 patients when those injured in the attack arrived in emergency rooms on Thursday.
National Guard troops had been stationed at medical centers to help cope with the influx of Covid-19 patients, and emergency medical providers had recently issued a dire warning to local officials about the strain on hospitals.
“Currently our system emergency departments are operating dangerously over capacity,” the medical providers wrote on Aug. 16. They added, “We may be unable to provide timely care to everyone and will have to make choices about delivering care to patients based on their probability of survival.”
They expressed particular concern about what could happen in the event of a disaster, given that “the city has no surge capacity to accommodate any additional disaster or unplanned events.”
An average of 96 percent of I.C.U. beds were occupied in Shelby County, Tenn., on Thursday, according to New York Times data. One nearby facility, St. Francis Hospital, reported that its I.C.U. was 100 percent full; another said its I.C.U. was 97 percent full. There were 15 I.C.U. beds available in the five counties in and around Memphis as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, according to the Shelby County Health Department.
Officials said at least a dozen people were hurt and one killed inside the Kroger store in Collierville, about 30 miles east of Memphis in Shelby County.
Regional One Health, a hospital in Memphis, had received nine patients injured in the shooting, according to a spokeswoman. She said the hospital had the capacity to accommodate those patients. Baptist Memorial Hospital in Collierville received one patient, who was discharged, and Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis received two, according to a spokeswoman.
Shelby County reported its highest number of Covid-19 cases during the pandemic last month. Those numbers have decreased slightly in recent weeks but remain high, with a seven-day average of 409 cases.
Only 44 percent of the state’s population has been fully vaccinated. Governor Bill Lee recently signed an executive order overruling attempts by local officials to require masks in schools. A federal judge blocked the governor’s order from taking effect in Shelby County on Friday after opponents fought it in court.
SYDNEY, Australia — In the war against the coronavirus’s Delta variant, few if any democracies have demanded as much of their people as Australia.
In the middle of the latest lockdowns, the police in Sydney gave hefty fines to three mothers with strollers chatting in a park. Melbourne’s playgrounds were wrapped in police tape, and traveling from a state with Covid restrictions to one without — for the lucky few granted permission by the authorities — requires two-week stints in quarantine at a hotel or a remote former mining camp.
There are now two Australias. In Perth, offices, pubs and stadiums are crammed and normal as ever — the payoff for a closed-border approach that has made Western Australia an island within an island. In Sydney, residents are approaching their 14th week of lockdown. The working-class areas with the highest infection rates have faced a heavy police presence, and, until recently, a 9 p.m. curfew and just an hour of outdoor exercise per day.
Is the sacrifice worth it?
Australia is at a crossroads with Covid. The confidence and pride of 2020, when lockdowns and isolation brought outbreaks to heel, have been replaced by doubt, fatigue and a bitter battle over how much freedom or risk should be allowed in a Delta-defined future.
Some states are trying desperately to hold on to what worked before, while New South Wales and Victoria, home to the country’s biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, are being forced by Delta outbreaks to find a more nuanced path forward. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has thrown his weight behind a plan to reopen when 80 percent of adults are fully vaccinated. But the road ahead may not be smooth — as shown by protests this week over a vaccine mandate — and state leaders are still insisting that they will go it alone.
“We might be looking at the country turning the clock back on itself,” said Tim Soutphommasane, a political theorist at the University of Sydney. “There is an explicit insularity and parochialism that now dictates debate.”
A one-month-old baby in Turkey was mistakenly injected with Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid vaccine in July, officials, doctors and the family said this week.
The baby is in good health and has shown no adverse effects, but doctors are still monitoring it closely, health officials said.
The baby’s family brought it to their doctor’s clinic in the western province of Izmir in July for a hepatitis B shot, one of the childhood vaccinations given to all babies when they turn a month old in Turkey.
But instead the baby was given a coronavirus injection, an error that surprised health professionals around the country because the vaccination system is computer-monitored. As a security measure, every shot is matched to the name of the recipient using a bar code.
A couple of hours after the appointment, officials went to the family’s residence and alerted them to the error. They were told to take their baby to the hospital, Dilek Guzel, a lawyer representing the family, said in a statement.
The baby was monitored in the hospital for a week, Ms. Guzel said. The family has not been named publicly.
“My clients are told that it is unknown whether any permanent problem because of the vaccine would occur or not,” Ms. Guzel said, adding that the baby is still being monitored.
The incident came to light earlier this week during a television interview with Zafer Kurugol, a professor of child diseases at Ege University Hospital in Izmir, who examined the infant after the injection.
“We monitored this baby for days, just in case anything might happen,” Dr. Kurugol told NTV radio. There were no ill effects, he said, and the baby, who was given an adult dose, developed antibodies against the coronavirus.
Dr. Kurugol was being interviewed about the safety of vaccines. But his anecdote about the baby drew the ire of his colleagues, health officials and the public. Many of his colleagues considered his remarks to be disrespectful to family physicians around the country who handle the vaccination of babies as well as coronavirus vaccinations. Anti-vaccine critics also took the incident as more proof for their concerns.
Turkey has administered more than 107 million coronavirus vaccinations and has fully vaccinated 64 percent of its population, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
After Dr. Kurugol’s remarks, the Health Ministry said that an investigation had already been opened, as the nurse who administered the shot reported himself, and the computer-based system also flagged the error. The ministry said it would also investigate Dr. Kurugol because of his “unfortunate” remarks.
Dr. Kurugol said the case of the infant would soon be published in a respected scientific journal, with the written consent of the family.
The family also made a criminal complaint, saying they wanted to prevent any similar mistakes from happening.
“The family believes in science,” Ms. Guzel said. “They don’t want their baby’s case to be turned into an anti-vaccination campaign.”
Last year, roughly 2,000 public companies in the United States held their annual shareholders meetings virtually, according to Broadridge Financial Solutions. That was up from about 300 in 2019.
Now, a group of shareholder activists are pushing companies to keep those meetings virtual, or add a remote option, permanently. They are having some success, the DealBook newsletter reports.
This week, the S.E.C. ruled that two companies, Brinker International and Campbell Soup, had to allow a shareholder vote on whether the remote option for meetings would continue. The companies had asked the S.E.C. to allow them to exclude the proposals at their upcoming meetings. After the ruling, Brinker decided to make its meeting open to remote attendees. Campbell will hold a vote on the matter at its next meeting.
Shareholder meetings have traditionally been in-person affairs. Companies generally prefer that format because it limits attendees — and with it questions that board members might face. Shareholder advocates have long said that virtual meetings level the playing field for smaller investors who might not have the resources to travel to a meeting.
Virtual meetings “fundamentally change the scope of shareholder engagement and accessibility,” said Matthew Prescott, a shareholder advocate and senior director at the Humane Society. His group sponsored the proposals about virtual meetings at Brinker and Campbell.
Shareholders have long had the ability to vote remotely before a meeting. A study this year found that meetings held virtually did not tend to generate significantly more shareholder engagement than in-person meetings.
“These shareholder proposals will not garner any meaningful support,” said Douglas Chia, a corporate governance expert and the author of the study. “My prediction: The S.E.C. has now opened the door for proposals to do away with virtual-only annual meetings, so we’ll see a lot of those being submitted soon.”
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