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For nearly a year it was the Trump show. Now President Joe Biden is calling up the nation’s top scientists and public health experts to regularly brief the American public about the pandemic that has claimed more than 425,000 U.S. lives. Beginning Wednesday, administration experts will host briefings three times a week on the state of the outbreak, efforts to control it and the race to deliver vaccines and therapeutics to end it. Expect a sharp contrast from the last administration’s briefings, when public health officials were repeatedly undermined by a president who shared his unproven ideas without hesitation. “We’re...

French schoolteachers and university students staged nationwide strikes and protests on Tuesday as they joined forces to demand more government support amid the pandemic. “No virus protocol, no school!” read posters carried by schoolteachers, demanding better virus protections at their schools, which have remained open since September amid concern over learning gaps and to ease the burden on working parents. “Sick of Zoom!” chanted university students, frustrated that they've been barred from campuses since October. Aside from virus fears, the common concern at Tuesday's protests in Paris, Marseille and other cities around France was economic. Teachers unions, who are negotiating...

Keeping schools closed is having a "calamitous" impact on children, some of the UK's top paediatricians have warned as they called for teachers to be prioritised for a vaccine. The group said they were witnessing an "acute and rapid increase in mental health and safeguarding cases", with parents suffering breakdowns and other psychological stress due to home-schooling. Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi insisted it was the government's "absolute priority" to re-open schools. But Labour said people "need certainty" about how low coronavirus rates need to sink for all children to be sent back to the classroom. Over the weekend, Health Secretary...

I mean, are you shocked by this revelation? Joe Biden pretty much says he has no immediate plan to combat the coronavirus. None. It can be summed up in six words: “there is nothing we can do.” Okay, that’s not exactly fair. He said, there is nothing we can do for several months. We’re in cruise control, but that’s not what he told America on the campaign trail. He didn’t say we're going to coast for the better part of a year with no plan to voters. It was ‘I’m going to stop it and Trump is at fault.’ ‘Trump...

PARIS - France’s top health advisory body on Saturday recommended doubling the time between people being given the first and second COVID-19 vaccinations to six weeks from three in order to increase the number getting inoculated. The gap between the first and second injection in France is currently three weeks for people in retirement homes, who take priority, and four weeks for others such as health workers. The Haute Autorite de Sante (HAS) said spacing out the two required vaccinations of the Pfizer/BioNtech and Moderna vaccines would allow the treatment of at least 700,000 more people in the first month....

A Republican Congressman is proposing to bribe Americans with federal stimulus cash in order to coerce them into getting experimental COVID-19 vaccines that have already shown to produce tremendous negative side-effects. Congressman Steve Stivers (R-OH) intends to make the next stimulus check contingent upon receiving the controversial and novel vaccinations. Stivers aims to deny $1,400 for ailing Americans desperate for economic relief unless they are stuck with the Big Pharma shots.

Coronavirus infections did not slow down and may have increased instead in the first days of the latest national lockdown, a major ongoing study has found. Researchers also said it will be weeks before the vaccine rollout has a substantial effect. The study from REACT-1 at Imperial College in London said: "During the initial 10 days of the third COVID-19 lockdown… prevalence of COVID-19 was very high with no evidence of decline." Programme director Professor Paul Elliot went further, saying: "Our data are showing worrying suggestions of a recent uptick in infections which we will continue to monitor closely." The...

After witnessing some opposing players disregarding new league rules against unnecessary contact on game nights, the NBA is moving team security into the midcourt area to dissuade violations that include hugging and handshakes, according to a league memo obtained by ESPN on Wednesday. As coronavirus infections increased amid a darkening pandemic, the NBA recently tightened regulations on players and staffs, including several meant to lessen the possibility of on-court transmissions.

The evidence that the second dose can be delayed for three months looks shaky - not even the manufacturers recommend it. Vaccines have to work in the real world, not in the artificial bubble of a clinical trial. So the findings from Israel's impressively-rapid rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine are troubling. They suggest the UK's decision to delay the second dose exposes the elderly and vulnerable to a significantly higher risk of infection than we were told by the government's vaccines advisers. But the stats from Israel suggests that the efficacy of one dose is just 33%. The Israeli scientists...

In late December, scientists in California began searching coronavirus samples for a fast-spreading new variant that had just been identified in Britain. They found it, though in relatively few samples. But in the process, the scientists made another unwelcome discovery: California had produced a variant of its own. That mutant, which belongs to a lineage known as CAL.20C, seemed to have popped up in July but lay low till November. Then it began to quickly spread. CAL.20C accounted for more than half of the virus genome samples collected in Los Angeles laboratories on Jan. 13, according to a new study...

The eastern state of Saxony, where hospitals have been struggling to cope with one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the country, has confirmed plans to hold quarantine breakers in a fenced off section of a refugee camp. Saxony is set to construct the centre next week. The regional state has stressed that the facility will only be used for people who have repeatedly broken the rules around quarantine even after facing financial penalties. Three further states - Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg and Schleswig-Holstein - have also either already created such facilities or are in the process of doing so, a report...

As the media hail president-elect Joe Biden’s appointment of the first-ever trans cabinet official, few note how she presided over a massive Covid-19 death toll in care homes in her prior post as Pennsylvania’s health secretary. Biden announced on Tuesday that he will appoint Dr. Rachel Levine as assistant health secretary in his administration, setting her up to become the first openly transgender official confirmed by the Senate. Levine has served in her post as Pennsylvania health secretary since 2018 and, before that, was the state’s assistant health secretary for a year. She had previously spent two years as physician...

WASHINGTON - Containing the coronavirus outbreak and repairing the economic damage it has inflicted are the top priorities for Americans as Joe Biden prepares to become the 46th president of the United States, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Overall, 53% of Americans name COVID-19 as one of the top five issues they want the government to tackle this year, and 68% mention in some way the economy, which is still reeling from the outbreak. In an open-ended question, those priorities far outpace others, like foreign affairs, immigration, climate change or racial...

On Wednesday of last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that residents age 65 and above were now eligible to schedule appointments to receive either Pfizer or Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. Just one problem: The state does not have final say over who gets vaccinated when. That power rests with individual counties and health care providers. “We’re not done with our health care workers,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said when explaining why her county is not ready to expand eligibility. “We haven’t heard back from the state about vaccine availability and how it would be distributed.” Dr....

China and the World Health Organization could have acted faster to avert catastrophe during the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, a panel of independent experts has concluded. he Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said its evaluation of the start of the crisis in China “suggests that there was potential for early signs to have been acted on more rapidly”. Containment measures should have been implemented immediately in all countries where transmission was likely, the panel said. The panel said it was clear that “public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health...

... With its sandy beaches and year-round sunshine, Los Angeles conjures up images of celebrities and tanned residents comfortably scattered in a sprawl of roomy single-family homes. But the popular images of L.A. belie the reality for millions of residents, many of whom are considered essential and live in dense or multigenerational housing at a time when public health officials recommend working from home and maintaining social distance. Death rates among Latinos in L.A. are twice as high as in the rest of the population, according to public health officials. And Latinos, who are about half of all county residents,...

...But wait. There’s more. They observed that — at least since 2016 — the WIV had been involved with researching bat coronavirus that is 96.2% similar to the SARS-CoV-2, the Wuhan coronavirus. WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli had previously said that the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 didn’t match. Moreover, the State Department says the WIV hasn’t been transparent about their studies and said a full accounting was needed for why the WIV altered and removed their records about the bat coronavirus and other viruses. The State Department also observes that the WIV has conducted “secret projects with China’s military” and...

Fact Sheet For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin, choosing instead to devote enormous resources to deceit and disinformation. Nearly two million people have died. Their families deserve to know the truth. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one. The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was...

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. - The U.S. government executed a drug trafficker Thursday for slaying seven people in a burst of violence in Virginia’s capital in 1992, with some witnesses in the death-chamber building applauding as the 52-year-old was pronounced dead. Corey Johnson’s execution went ahead after his lawyers scrambled to stop it on grounds that the lethal injection of pentobarbital would cause him excruciating pain due to lung damage from his coronavirus infection last month. Johnson was implicated with playing a role in one of the worst bursts of gang violence Richmond had ever seen, with 11 people killed in...

LONDON - People across the world are generally likely to say yes to getting a COVID-19 vaccine, but would be more distrustful of shots made in China or Russia than those developed in Germany or the United States, an international poll showed on Friday. The survey, conducted by the polling company YouGov and shared exclusively with Reuters, found Britons and Danes were the most willing to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them, while the French and Poles were more likely to be hesitant. The poll was based on questions put to almost 19,000 people. Friday’s YouGov...