Health News

The Latest on the effects of the coronavirus outbreak on sports around the world:

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As Darlington Raceway prepares for its first of two NASCAR visits this season, track officials announced Friday they plan to fully open the grandstands for the Southern 500 on Labor Day weekend.

The raceway will hold the Goodyear 400 on Sunday to limited spectators. Darlington President Kerry Tharp said that will change this summer when the series returns when there will be no limits on fans. Darlington Raceway has a seating capacity of about 47,000.

Tharp thanked South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster is helping the facility re-open fully for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic hit in the spring of 2020. This is the first time since 2004 the track has had two scheduled races for the NASCAR Cup Series.

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Canada will not send a gymnastics team to a last-chance Tokyo Olympic qualifier because of COVID-19 concerns.

The 2021 Senior Pan American Championships are in Rio de Janeiro from June 4-13. Canada’s would have been trying to qualify in men’s artistic, women’s artistic and rhythmic gymnastics.

Canada had the opportunity to qualify one more gymnast in men’s and women’s artistic and one individual and one group in rhythmic gymnastics at the competition.

The event also is a qualifier for trampoline, but there will be another qualification event in that discipline in Italy.

Gymnastics Canada also said Friday the risk was “too high” to send a team to the 2021 Junior Pan American Championships in Guadalajara, Mexico.

“In this pandemic environment, an additional layer of concern is required when travelling internationally to competitions,” Ian Moss, CEO of the governing body, said in a statement.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — It won’t speed the manufacture of vaccines. It enraged the developers who delivered lifesaving doses in record time. But President Joe Biden’s decision to support waiving intellectual property rights for coronavirus shots had a broader purpose: to broadcast his administration’s commitment to global leadership.

More than a month of internal debate led up to Biden’s decision this week to endorse international calls to strip patent protections for vaccines.

The policy shift, embraced by many charitable service organizations around the world and liberals at home, wasn’t new. Biden endorsed it during his campaign for the White House. But the idea was the subject of pitched discussions inside the administration over how best to bring the pandemic to an end while restoring U.S. influence abroad.

In the best case, officials acknowledge it will take at least a year for any additional vaccines to be produced due to the change. Key European leaders are adamantly opposed to the waivers, and securing the required consensus at the World Trade Organization many never happen.

The specialized production, particularly of the cutting-edge mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, would take even longer. Moreover, the matter could become less pressing if vaccine manufacturers can produce enough to satisfy international demand themselves.

To Biden, White House officials said, that’s largely beside the point, as officials cast the decision as indicative of the president’s efforts to return the U.S. to the position of leadership after four years of unilateralism and protectionism under former President Donald Trump.

“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said Wednesday in announcing the move.

The announcement was met with surprise and disappointment by some of Biden’s closest European allies. German Chancellor Angela Merkel quickly weighed in against it, with a government spokesman saying it would cause “severe complications” for the production of vaccines.

The timing of the decision also blindsided the vaccine companies, which had aggressively discouraged the administration from making a choice they feel will hurt American producers.

Officials noted, however, that Tai held more than two dozen meetings with stakeholders, including the drug makers.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also opposed the plan, but was excluded from the final meeting, two people familiar with the decision-making process but not authorized to speak publicly about private deliberations said on condition of anonymity. Other White House officials highlighted the practical limitations of Biden’s decision, but the symbolism won the day.

Trade groups warned it could curtail future investment in lifesaving drugs, and vaccine manufacturers and some Republican lawmakers warned that it would amount to a giveaway of American technological knowhow to China. Vaccine manufacturing historically has not been a huge profit driver for drug makers.

“The Chinese Communist Party is already celebrating this gift from President Biden,” tweeted Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, as he highlighted a comment from a Chinese official praising Biden’s action.

A vaccine manufactured by a Chinese company was given emergency use authorization Friday by the World Health Organization, potentially creating a pathway for millions of the doses to reach needy countries through a U.N.-backed program rolling out coronavirus vaccines.

The decision by a WHO technical advisory group — a first for a Chinese vaccine — opens the possibility that Sinopharm’s offering could be included in the U.N.-backed COVAX program in coming weeks or months and distributed through UNICEF and the WHO’s Americas regional office.

But U.S. vaccine manufacturers also warned that the Biden administration’s move could hurt the global supply of shots in the near to moderate term.

The primary obstacle to vaccine production, they’ve argued, remains production bottlenecks and shortages of the specialized supplies needed to make the shots — a challenge that could become more acute if other countries hoard them in anticipation of trying to make their own doses at home. The Pfizer vaccine, for instance, has more than 200 components, many of which are in demand around the world.

Some in the Biden White House, in addition to noting that the president pledged to do this during the campaign, also believe that it creates a low stakes political victory. They said the decision, which has been applauded by some on the left, is good Democratic politics and that few will be outraged on the behalf of the drug companies, even though those firms have been praised as heroes of the pandemic.

White House aides maintain that Biden’s action is limited to COVID-19 vaccines because of the scale of the pandemic, but some progressives who have pushed to have the government regulate the price of prescription drugs saw an opening.

“Here’s why Pharma’s really really whining about the COVID vaccine patents: the government might finally have the spine to lower drug prices here at home,” tweeted Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday. “And it should.”

“President Biden can lower drug prices by producing drugs like insulin, naloxone, and EpiPens at low costs,” she said. “And he doesn’t need Congress to do it — he can use existing compulsory licensing and march-in authorities to bypass patents for public health needs.”

The debate over the inoculations comes as the administration set a new goal to deliver at least one shot to 70% of adult Americans by July Fourth as Biden tackles the vexing problem of winning over the skeptics and those unmotivated to get vaccinated.

Demand for vaccines has dropped off markedly nationwide, with some states leaving more than half their allotment of doses unordered. Already more than 56% of American adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and nearly 105 million are fully vaccinated. The U.S. is currently administering first doses at a rate of about 965,000 per day — half the rate of three weeks ago, but almost twice as fast as needed to meet Biden’s target.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden insists an unexpected slowdown in companies’ hiring is clear new proof the U.S. needs the multitrillion-dollar federal boost he’s pushing. But his sales effort is challenged by critics who say Friday’s jobless figures show his earlier aid legislation — successfully rushed through Congress — is actually doing more harm than good.

Biden’s promised economic comeback hardly stalled on Friday. But it seemed to sputter a bit with a report that found merely modest April job gains of 266,000 and complicated his new $4 trillion push for infrastructure, education and children.

The employment report failed to show that the U.S. economy was accelerating so much as stutter-stepping along as the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1%. Economists had projected roughly one million added jobs last month, and the modest hiring indicated that the earlier $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package has provided an uneven boost so far.

The figures present Biden with a fresh challenge at a critical moment in his presidency. He is betting that an open embrace of massive government spending will help resolve the nation’s public health and financial turmoil — and lift the political prospects for Democrats heading into next year’s elections. But the disappointing jobs numbers could also embolden his critics and stiffen the Republican resistance to the infrastructure package Biden is trying to push through Congress.

Addressing the report, Biden sought to ease concerns.

“We knew this wouldn’t be a sprint—it’d be a marathon,” he said. The pandemic relief package “was designed to help us over the course of a year, not 60 days. A year. We never thought that after the first 50 or 60 days everything would be fine. Today, there’s more evidence our economy is moving in the right direction. But it’s clear we have a long way to go.”

Biden’s opponents say the legislation actually worsened problems in at least one way, with expanded unemployment benefits that gave the jobless a reason to stay at home instead of seeking work.

The president said the jobs data don’t show that. And advocates for his plans argue that the report shows more spending is needed to sustain the economy.

There are also issues of supply shortages — for computer chips, lumber and more — that are holding back growth, a reminder that the world’s largest economy seldom bends perfectly to the wishes of lawmakers.

The fate of the president’s agenda may depend on how the public processes and understands the April jobs report in the coming weeks, said Jon Lieber, a managing director at the Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory and consulting firm.

“Are the Republicans able to seize on this as, ‘This is what happens when the government gets involved in the economy and screws things up?’ Or, does the public see this as the need for more government support?” Lieber said. “That’s the argument for the next month.”

One clear takeaway across partisan lines was a need for caution in interpretation. A single monthly report can be volatile. The three-month average of job gains is still a healthy 524,000.

Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, noted that many businesses have said they cannot find workers to hire despite increases in hourly pay. Strain said he plans to monitor upcoming reports to see if that pattern holds in what could be a troubling sign for Biden’s vision of how to generate growth through government spending.

“If we continue to hear a growing chorus of businesses complaining about worker shortages and if wages continue to rise, then it will be tempting to conclude that a lot of the 8 million jobs we are currently missing aren’t coming back,” Strain said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents businesses, put the blame squarely on the relatively generous unemployment benefits that Biden extended as part of his relief package. The group said the checks prevent people from accepting jobs.

“One step policymakers should take now is ending the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the Chamber. “Based on the Chamber’s analysis, the $300 benefit results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.”

Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said he has heard companies say they’re struggling to find workers, but he didn’t see those concerns reflected in the jobs report. For example, restaurants and bars added 187,000 jobs last month even though workers in that relatively low-wage sector would, in theory, have an incentive to just collect unemployment.

The jobs report hinted at other factors that could strengthen Biden’s agenda. It showed losses for women, who were forced into caregiver roles for children and relatives because of the pandemic. The family demands stopped them from holding outside jobs.

There was a drop of 165,000 for women over the age of 20 last month who were holding or seeking jobs. By contrast, men saw gains of 355,000 in labor force participation.

One way to bring women back could be Biden’s plans to fund child care, create a national family leave program and expand the child tax credit through 2025 — the idea being that government action is needed to unlock the job market.

“When you start squinting at this data to figure out what is going on, it looks like you need more government to get past a labor shortage,” said Michael Madowitz, an economist at the liberal Center for American Progress.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi cited the “disappointing” jobs report as proof that Biden’s $4 trillion agenda must be approved quickly.

“The evidence is clear that the economy demands urgent action, and Congress will not be deterred or delayed from delivering transformational investments for the people,” the Democratic congressional leader said.

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(RNS) — Jeff Weddle, a 46-year-old, wise-cracking, self-deprecating, Bible-loving, self-described “failing pastor” from Wisconsin, was already thinking of leaving the ministry before COVID and the 2020 election.

He was, as he put it, fed up with church life after two decades as a pastor.

Then, what he called “the stupid” — feuds about politics and the pandemic — put him over the edge. People at church seemed more concerned about the latest social media dustup and online conspiracy theories — one church member called him the antichrist for his views on COVID— than in learning about the Bible.

Sunday mornings had become filled with dread over what could go wrong next.

He eventually decided, “I don’t need this anymore.” Weddle stepped down as pastor, walked out the door and hasn’t looked back.

The last eighteen months or so have been difficult for pastors like Weddle. Already stretched with the day-to-day concerns of running a congregation at a time when organized religion is on the decline, they’ve increasingly found that the divides facing the nation have made their way inside the walls of the church.

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This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.

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Clergy also felt a sense of isolation, cut off from contact with their congregations and unable to do the kind of in-person ministry that drew them to the pastorate. Instead of preaching and visiting the sick, they had to become video producers and online content creators.

Chuck DeGroat, professor of counseling and Christian spirituality at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, said pastors have long had to mediate disputes over theology or church practice, like the role of women in the church or the so-called “ worship wars ” of recent decades. They now face added stresses from the pandemic and polarization, with people willing to leave their churches over mask policies or discussions of race.

“I’m hearing from pastors that they just don’t know what to do,” he said.

A recent survey of Protestant pastors by the research firm Barna Group found that 29% said they had given “real, serious consideration to quitting being in full-time ministry within the last year.”

David Kinnaman, president of Barna, said the past year has been a “crucible” for pastors. Churches have become fragmented by political and social divides. They have also become frayed, as “people’s connectedness to local congregations is waning.

“The pandemic was a great revealer of the challenges churches face,” said Kinnaman.

The Rev. Kerri Parker, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, whose member organizations include about 2,000 churches and a million Christians, has been concerned about the stresses clergy have been under since 2020.

Last summer, the council surveyed clergy and found about a quarter said they were considering retiring or leaving the pastorate due to the stresses of ministry during COVID.

In a recent follow-up survey, said Parker, about a third of respondents said they were considering their options or thinking about leaving.

Parker said that unlike past crises, like floods, tornadoes or other disasters, pastors won’t be able to escape the fallout from COVID-19 once the pandemic is over. If there’s a flood, she said, a pastor could stay at their church, help them clean up and rebuild and then at some point move to another church that hadn’t been through that disaster.

But COVID affected everyone.

“So where do you go?” she said. “Out of the church.”

For Brandon Cox, serving as a pastor had been a joy until last year.

In 2011, Cox and his wife, Angie, had started a new church in Bentonville, Arkansas, called Grace Hills. Cox described Grace Hills as a “Celebrate Recovery”-style congregation, inspired by the support group ministry founded at Saddleback Church in Southern California, where Cox had once worked.

“Up until 2020, we had a fantastic time,” Cox, 46, told Religion News Service in a phone interview.

The trifecta of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 election and the racial reckoning in response to the death of George Floyd hit like a “wrecking ball.”

Grace Hills shut down in-person worship at the beginning of the pandemic, which prompted people to leave. More left when the church reopened and required masks. When Cox and a Black pastor preached a Sunday sermon together after Floyd’s death and said that yes, Black lives matter, that caused more turmoil. No matter what Cox did, someone was angry.

“It was sort of relentless,” said Cox, who stepped down as pastor at Grace Hill at the end of April. “My wife and I just found ourselves in the place of exhaustion.”

Cox talked to RNS nine days after his last Sunday as a pastor and said he hasn’t given up on Christianity — he hopes to find a new church to attend in the coming months — but pastoral ministry is no longer for him.

Leaving the ministry has challenges. After 24 years in vocational ministry, Cox felt he didn’t have many career options. For now, he plans to work for a local real estate company.

“I kept telling people, ‘You’d be amazed how many jobs you’re not qualified for,’” said Cox.

Even before COVID, the demands of the job wore on many clergy.

The Rev. Emily Reeves Grammer served as pastor of several United Methodist congregations in the Nashville area for a decade before leaving the pastorate in 2019. Grammer, who has two children, said balancing the demands of ministry and family life proved daunting.

Grammer, who is 36, said she loved being a pastor. But she worried about the long-term sustainability of her calling to be a pastor, given that the United Methodist Church seems headed for a schism.

“I am really concerned about the ability of a lot of United Methodist churches to keep supporting full-time clergy people,” she said.

While thinking about the future, she talked with older pastors who felt it was too late for them to change careers. The advice she got was this: If you are going to leave, do it now. So she resigned from her church and went back to school to become an English teacher.

“What I love most about being a pastor is gathering people together around a text and making meaning together out of that text,” she said. Teaching literature, she said, will allow her to do the same thing.

Charlie Cotherman, pastor of Oil City Vineyard Church in rural Pennsylvania, said that, in his part of the world, pastors who had strong denominational ties and relationships to draw on may have weathered the pandemic better than pastors who were on their own.

Cotherman, who directs the Rural Ministry Project at Grove City College, said most of the pastors he works with have done pretty well during the pandemic. Some had the advantage of being in small communities with low COVID infection rates, so they were able to return to in-person services quickly.

Still, he said, COVID has taken a toll. In some churches, members, especially families, left when services went online and just haven’t come back.

“Some of these small churches in rural areas have a couple of young families,” he said. “For them to lose even one of them has been a really tough thing.”

Before he left the ministry, Weddle began a blog at FailingPastor.com, detailing some of his concerns about the ministry. Weddle said he gave the ministry his best for 21 years. But being a pastor proved an almost impossible task.

“Ultimately, you want people to grow in Christ — to be caring, making sense of the Bible and applying it to their life,” he said. “And, you know, for thousands of years it’s been very difficult to get people to do that. So, the job is inherently frustrating.”

Leaving the ministry has been a relief.

“I’ve been going to church,” he wrote recently. “I don’t have to do anything at a church for the first time in 21 years. I don’t have to worry about who isn’t there, or why, or who will be mad next. I don’t have to have regrets all afternoon and evening about how I messed up my sermon.”

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Javier “Chicharito” Hernández will be participating in his first El Tráfico but it remains to be seen whether he will be facing close friend Carlos Vela.

The LA Galaxy and LAFC — whose stadiums are only 12 miles apart — have the first of three regular-season meetings Saturday when the Galaxy host at Dignity Health Sports Park. The possible matchup of Mexican superstars has lifted the four-year-old rivalry to another level.

Hernández and Vela grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, and came up together through Chivas’ system and have played for Mexico’s national team in two World Cups. Both were plagued by injuries last season and didn’t face each other.

“This one has more special meaning in a way. It is a little bit different,” Hernández said. “I would love to play against him because of the relationship I have with him.”

Vela, the 2019 MLS MVP and top goal scorer, suffered a quadriceps strain 22 minutes into the April 17 opener against Austin FC and hasn’t played the past two games. Last season, he suffered a knee injury in August that kept him out for three months.

LAFC coach Bob Bradley said Vela has resumed training and his participation Saturday will be a gametime decision. Bradley’s squad has played to draws against Seattle and Houston after winning its opener.

Hernández has bounced back after being limited last season. He scored five goals in the Galaxy’s first two games this season, becoming the first MLS player in 15 years to do that. LA is 2-1 after a 3-0 loss at Seattle.

Vela and Hernández have not been on opposing sides since 2013, when Vela’s Real Sociedad faced Hernández and Manchester United in a pair of Champions League group stage matches.

“I always want to face the best teams and players because it’s always great when we can elevate in the league and the competition as well. So of course it would be amazing,” Hernández said.

Bradley said he has noticed a fresher Chicharito and that new coach Greg Vanney’s style has also benefited his playing style.

Despite its short history, El Tráfico has produced many memorable moments. Zlatan Ibrahimovic came on as a substitute in his Galaxy debut and had a pair of second-half goals in the first meeting in 2018. LAFC beat its rival for the first time in a 2019 Western Conference semifinal.

The teams split the four games last season. Overall, the Galaxy have won four of the nine regular-season meetings, with LAFC taking two. The teams have played to a draw three times. Vela has eight goals against the Galaxy.

The game, which will be televised on Fox, should help Major League Soccer establish more of a footprint in Mexico. The league was supposed to play its All-Star Game last year against the top players from Mexico’s Liga MX, but it was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Commissioner Don Garber said the league plans to have an All-Star Game this season but the format remains to be determined.

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