Archives for February 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration announced Tuesday that it is moving to expand access to COVID-19 vaccines, freeing up more doses for states and beginning to distribute them to retail pharmacies next week. The push comes amid new urgency to speed vaccinations to prevent the spread of potentially more serious strains of the virus that has killed more than 445,000 Americans.

Starting next week, 1 million doses will be distributed to some 6,500 pharmacies across the country, the White House said. The administration is also boosting by 500,000 the weekly allocation of vaccines sent directly to states and territories for the coming weeks, up to 10.5 million. It is allowing state and local governments to receive additional federal dollars to cover previously incurred expenses relating to the pandemic.

Coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients announced the moves on a call with the nation’s governors Tuesday morning and then detailed them to the public in an afternoon news conference.

Drugstores have become a mainstay for flu shots and shingles vaccines, and the industry is capable of vaccinating tens of millions of people monthly. “This will provide more sites for people to get vaccinated in their communities,” Zients said.

“This is a critical step to provide the public with convenient trusted places to get vaccinated in their communities,” he added.

The number of participating pharmacies and the allocation of vaccines are expected to accelerate as drug makers increase production. The White House said the ultimate goal was to distribute the vaccines through more than 40,000 pharmacies nationwide. State and local guidelines will determine who is eligible to get a shot at their neighborhood pharmacy. Availability will be limited at first.

“Getting it into pharmacies is a viable approach,” said Dan Mendelson, founder of the health care industry consulting firm Avalere Health. “The pharmacies know how to move people in and out.”

Part of the reason the vaccination campaign got off to a slow start, he added, is that states lacked their own infrastructure for mass vaccinations.

The partnership with drugstores was originally announced by the Trump administration in November. At that time, no coronavirus vaccines had been approved. Participating are major chains like CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid, big box stores such as Walmart and Costco, and supermarket pharmacies. CVS said it will receive 250,000 doses initially, to be distributed to pharmacies in 11 states.

The pharmacy doses will be distributed to states by population, but a priority will be to get the vaccine to minority communities that have suffered a disproportionately high toll of disease and deaths from the virus, Zients said.

He said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was “making sure that we are picking pharmacies in that first phase that are located in areas that are harder to reach to ensure that we have equitable distribution of the pharmacy doses.” Walgreens said it was selected in part to “optimize vaccine access in medically underserved areas.”

The 1 million doses being shipped to pharmacies will be on top of the increased allotments to states over the coming three weeks. The Biden administration has sought to increase certainty to state governments on their upcoming allocations to streamline deliveries and prevent stockpiling of second doses for the two-dose regimens.

The Tuesday announcement comes a day after Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, called on Americans to get vaccinated as soon as they’re eligible to prevent further mutations of the virus. The U.S. is tracking the spread of potentially more virulent and treatment-resistant variants.

“Viruses cannot mutate if they don’t replicate,” Fauci said. “And if you stop their replication by vaccinating widely and not giving the virus an open playing field to continue to respond to the pressures that you put on it, you will not get mutations.”

The U.S. government has already starting working with vaccine manufacturers on potential booster shots to enhance protection against the variants.

Biden’s move to allow for an additional $3 billion to $5 billion in retroactive funding to state and local governments for reimbursement of pandemic-related spending was expected to free up more money for vaccine distribution.

“States will be fully repaid for things like masks, gloves and the mobilization of the National Guard, and they can use the additional resources for vaccination efforts and emergency supplies moving forward,” Zients said.

That is on top of additional assistance to state and local governments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency already authorized by the Biden administration for them to stand up and support vaccination sites across the country.

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania’s top election official spent the past year in the hot seat as she oversaw the vote in a swing state where the margin between presidential candidates would end up being barely 80,000 votes out of nearly 7 million cast.

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar helped implement a complicated 2019 vote-by-mail law, as well as an update rushed through to address the pandemic’s challenges. Many counties were using new paper-record voting machines for the first time. The primary had to be delayed.

And there was a relentless series of lawsuits and legislative hearings launched by Republicans, including a major case brought by then-President Donald Trump’s campaign in which Boockvar was the defendant.

But after navigating the sea of challenges in 2020, Boockvar is leaving her job in Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s Cabinet on Friday under a cloud that has nothing to do with last year’s election.

Boockvar’s agency did not advertise a proposed constitutional amendment that would give victims of childhood sexual abuse the ability to file civil claims that were otherwise undated. That failure means a two-year delay until the measure can go to voters for a final approval.

“It’s horrible,” Boockvar told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday. “I had nothing to do with the error that happened, but the buck stops with me. I head the agency.”

Neither Boockvar nor Wolf’s press secretary would say whether the governor asked for or demanded her resignation.

“We agreed this was the best course of action,” she said.

Boockvar declined to say whether any Department of State employees faced consequences for the mistake, which the administration has described as a “simple human error.”

“I’m 100% sure it was an administrative error and nothing more, that they did not track that constitutional amendment. But that’s got significant consequences,” she said.

Boockvar, who lives in Washington Crossing, is a lawyer whose career has included work as a staff attorney in voting rights for the Advancement Project, as a deputy auditor general and for a women’s health care organization in the Philadelphia suburbs. She also launched unsuccessful campaigns for Congress and Commonwealth Court.

She was a senior advisor to Wolf on election modernization before the governor elevated her to be secretary of state in January 2019. At that point, Boockvar said, she figured her biggest challenge would be leading a project that got all 67 counties to upgrade their voting machines.

Then came the November 2019 deal in which Wolf and fellow Democrats were able to expand mail-in voting to anyone who wanted it, and Republicans got rid of straight-ticket voting they saw as a hindrance to their candidates.

“In a perfect world you would not want to roll out a major change in a presidential year,” Boockvar said. “I couldn’t have that changed — everybody wanted it to take effect right away.”

A few months later the pandemic began, and Wolf and lawmakers passed another elections law to push back the primary and make other changes. Boockvar also found herself at the center of policy disputes regarding how vote-by-mail should work, whether ballot drop boxes were legal and the proper way to handle imperfectly filled-out mail ballots.

There were also lawsuits, including one Boockvar filed herself to get the state Supreme Court to clarify that counties should not reject ballots based on poll workers’ subjective judgments about whether signatures match those on file.

On Election Day, the two highest-ranking Republicans in the state Senate, Joe Scarnati and Jake Corman, put out a news release saying Boockvar should resign over her guidance to counties about how to count ballots that arrived late and how to could contact voters to fix problems with improperly completed mail-in ballots.

“She was just extremely difficult to deal with, and to me, her political background is how she operated as secretary of state,” said Corman, now the Senate’s president pro tempore. “She wasn’t a career person that had knowledge of how the department worked.”

Trump’s campaign sued her that week, trying to prevent the results from being certified because seven Democratic-controlled counties in Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, let voters make corrections to mail-in ballots that were otherwise going to be disqualified for a technicality, like lacking a secrecy envelope or a signature.

“Whenever I wanted to go to the Supreme Court website or see if anything had happened in any of the cases, you would just look up Kathy’s name, because she was the defendant in every single lawsuit,” said Democratic elections lawyer Adam Bonin.

None of the lawsuits alleging fraud was successful, and Boockvar did certify the results, sending Joe Biden’s electoral votes to Washington.

“She was one of primary voices on TV for those two months, assuring people as to the integrity of the election and answering every question,” Bonin said. “She was exceptional, and she had a public role in this that no prior secretary of state has had to have here.”

Boockvar said she received death threats, and she choked up as she confirmed she required special security. She’s been in contact with elections officials in other states who encountered similar problems.

“It is really devastating and infuriating at the same time that people who are spending their lives and their professional work ensuring that people can exercise their fundamental right to vote, the thanks they get are threats to their life,” she said.

She praised her agency staff and said she has never had a more demanding job.

“This amount of commitment and dedication was around-the-clock and around-the-week, every single day,” she said. “As it was for county election officials.”

Her future plans include continuing to work in the elections field, perhaps to combat misinformation and attacks on democracy.

“I’ve been thinking for months about how I can be working in this sphere in a broader capacity,” Boockvar said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government says it won’t be making routine immigration enforcement arrests at COVID-19 vaccination sites.

Vaccination sites will be considered “sensitive locations” and generally off limits for enforcement actions, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Monday.

It says arrests would only be carried out under “the most extraordinary of circumstances.”

It was the latest example of a softer tone on illegal immigration under President Joe Biden, whose administration has quickly moved to reverse major immigration policies of his predecessor.

In its statement, DHS said it encourages everyone “regardless of immigration status” to receive the vaccine when they are eligible and that the agency and its federal partners “fully support equal access to the COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine distribution sites for undocumented immigrants.”

DHS also oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is working with other parts of the federal government to set up vaccination sites around the country.

The U.S. government previously considered health clinics as well as schools and places of worship as sensitive locations where it would generally not carry out enforcement actions. Over the years, that prompted some people to take refuge in churches to avoid deportation.

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TORONTO (AP) — Canada most populous province on Monday reported its first case of a coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa that is believed to be more contagious than the original.

Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, said the case was found in the Peel region outside Toronto and the person does not have a known history of travel or any known contact with someone who has travelled.

British Columbia has also reported cases of the South African variant.

Viruses constantly mutate but scientists are especially concerned about the emergence of three that researchers believe may spread more easily. One first reported in the United Kingdom was previously confirmed in Canada, and Ontario has dozens of cases now.

The variant first found in South Africa was detected in October. Since then, it has been found in at least 30 other countries including the U.S.

The discovery comes as the pandemic-weary Ontario government is thinking of reopening schools in Canada’s largest city of Toronto and its suburbs.

Scientists recently reported preliminary signs that some of the recent mutations may modestly curb the effectiveness of two vaccines, although they stressed that the shots still protect against the disease.

The coronavirus has killed roughly 20,000 in Canada.

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