Both Biden and Businesses Are Moving to Vaccine Mandates
The ground will shift again today under the feet of the vaccine hesitant when President Joe Biden announces his plan, expected at 4:00 PM eastern time, to require all federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The ruling will not be an absolute mandate: employees will still be free to opt out, but they will face mask requirements, regular testing, social distancing rules and limits on travel, reports Reuters.
The president’s move will affect more than 2.7 million civilian employees and follows a ruling earlier this week by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that its doctors and medical staff be vaccinated. The VA employs more than 367,000 health care professionals. Earlier this week, California State Governor Gavin Newsome announced similar requirements for state employees, and yesterday Governor Andrew Cuomo did the same for New York; municipal employees in New York City will be subject to equivalent mandates.
The new rules rest on what so far seems to be solid legal ground, reports CNN. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel released an opinion on Monday declaring that federal law does not prohibit public agencies and private businesses from mandating vaccines even if, as with the COVID-19 shots, they have so far received only Emergency Use Authorization. Businesses, too, are making moves reflecting that fact: As the Associated Press reported today, Google has postponed its planned return to the office for employees from Sept. 1 to Oct. 18 and when workers do come back, they will be required to be vaccinated. The rule will first be imposed at the company’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters and Google’s other U.S. locations, before being rolled out to the other 40 countries where the company operates.
And Google is hardly alone. On Wednesday, Facebook announced a vaccine requirement before employees can return to work, CNN reports. Netflix is doing the same for the casts of all of its productions. Black Rock, Saks Fifth Avenue, Ascension Health, Twitter and Lyft are following suit. And Morgan Stanley is requiring vaccines not only for employees entering its offices, but also for clients.
Like all of those businesses, the White House is balancing the need to get people vaccinated against the risk that hard-core vaccine refusers will quit instead of getting the shot, reports The New York Times. The Biden administration’s approach, said Karine Jean-Pierre, the deputy White House press secretary on Wednesday, would be to give workers a choice between “confirming vaccination status or abiding by stringent Covid-19 protocols, like mandatory mask wearing ... and regular testing.”
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
Nearly 397.5 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of yesterday afternoon, of which some 344 million doses had been administered, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 49.4% of Americans had been completely vaccinated.
Nearly 196 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and nearly 4.2 million people have died. On July 28, there were 638,614 new cases and 9,853 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 3 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 34.6 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. Nearly 612,000 people have died. On July 28, there were 68,771 new cases and 387 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of July 29, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
Israel today became the first country to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine booster, offering a third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to people over 60, according to the Associated Press. The health ministry’s move comes after the release of a paper by Pfizer showing a slight drop in efficacy of its shot—from 96% two months after a second dose of the vaccine to 84% at four months, reports the Washington Post. Israeli recipients of a third dose must have had their second shot at least five months earlier, according to the government’s decision.
Even as the Olympics play out in Tokyo, the city continues to post record-breaking daily COVID-19 case counts, reports the Associated Press. Thursday saw 3,865 new cases, which followed Wednesday’s 3,177, double the numbers from a week ago. The city is now recording 88 cases per 100,000 people, compared to 18.5 in the U.S. and 48 in the U.K. On Wednesday, Japan as a whole posted a record-breaking 9,500 new cases.
The U.S. government is throwing its weight behind the World Health Organization’s push to reopen its investigation into the origin of COVID-19 in China, reports Reuters . On Wednesday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Kuwait City and discussed the move. According to a State Department statement, Blinken called for the investigation to be “timely, evidence-based, transparent, expert-led, and free from interference." China has rejected any further investigation, last week calling the lab leak theory a mere rumor. At a news conference Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the National Health Commission declared, “It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan.”
Vaccines are becoming such a polarizing issue that some people in Missouri who decide to get the shots are concealing their identity so as to avoid pressure or criticism from anti-vaccine friends and relatives, according to CNN. One hospitalist and chief medical information officer at Ozarks Healthcare in the city of West Plains reports that some people have attempted to use physical disguises to remain anonymous while others have requested that vaccines be administered to them in their cars. Just 41% of Missouri’s population is fully vaccinated compared to a national rate of 49.3%.
Pandemic-related stimulus payments will slash poverty nearly in half this year from pre-pandemic levels, pushing the share of poor families down to the lowest rate on record, reports The New York Times. There are roughly 20 million fewer Americans living in poverty now than in 2018, a decline of 45%. The development is all the more remarkable since it comes despite the fact that the country still faces an unemployment problem, with seven million fewer jobs than it had before the pandemic. The three programs that cut poverty most were stimulus checks, increased food stamps and expanded unemployment insurance.
In a speech on Wednesday, Myanmar’s military ruler pleaded for more international help in battling its coronavirus surge, reports Reuters. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing called for help in vaccination and treatment from other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and "friendly countries.” On Wednesday, the daily toll in the country surged to 4,980 cases and 365 deaths. Meanwhile, Myanmar has vaccinated only 3.2% of its population. Political chaos since a Feb. 1 coup ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has contributed to the challenges the country faces in bringing the pandemic under control.
Nursing home deaths in the U.S. are on the rise again, reports the Associated Press, due largely to low vaccination rates among staff. Nationwide, only about 59% of nursing home staffers have been fully vaccinated. That’s significantly lower than the 80% of nursing home residents who have gotten their shots. In some states, staff vaccination rates are as low as 40%. The result: infections deaths among staff in nursing homes, while far lower than in January, have begun creeping up again, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . That, of course, threatens the residents—endangering both those who are unvaccinated and those who have gotten the shots but still risk breakthrough infections.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Jeffrey Kluger and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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