Month: January 2021

Biden Covid advisor challenges Cuomo’s letter to buy vaccine directly

Carrens January 19, 2021

President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid Advisory Board member Dr. Celine Gounder slammed the Trump administration’s piecemeal Covid response as some states across the U.S. scramble to get the vaccine doses they need. 

“I think we’ve already had too much of a patchwork response across the states,” Gounder said in a Monday evening interview on “The News with Shepard Smith.”

In a Friday coronavirus briefing, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the federal government is sending his state 50,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than the week before. The state was getting fewer doses as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded vaccine eligibility to anyone over the age of 65 on Jan. 12.

On Monday, Cuomo sent a letter to Pfizer asking if the state of New York could buy vaccines directly from the company. Last week, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made a similar request to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

Gounder told host Shepard Smith that this approach could cause more problems than it solves. 

“I think Governor Cuomo, himself, had said back in the spring that the situation around ventilators was essentially ‘one big Ebay‘ with all of the states bidding against

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release of fourth quarter, full-year 2020 GDP

Carrens January 18, 2021

Employees working on a dry-type transformer production line at an electrical production factory in Haian, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province on Jan. 4, 2021.

Stringer | AFP | Getty Images

BEIJING — China reported Monday that its economy grew 2.3% last year as the world struggled to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

Gross domestic product rose by 6.5% in the fourth quarter from a year ago, official data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed. Those numbers beat analysts’ expectations.

However, Chinese consumers remained reluctant to spend, as retail sales contracted 3.9% for the year. Retail sales for the fourth quarter rose 4.6% from a year ago.

Online sales of consumer goods rose at a relatively rapid pace of 14.8% last year, the statistics bureau said, but the proportion of overall retail sales held fairly steady at around one-fourth.

Economists expected China to have been the only major economy to grow last year, and predicted GDP in 2020 expanded by just over 2%. Those polled by Reuters expected the economy to grow 6.1% in the fourth quarter, faster than the 4.9% pace of the prior quarter.

Chinese authorities have been trying to increase the economy’s reliance on domestic demand, rather than

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Democratic governors accuse Trump administration of misleading them about vaccine stockpile

Carrens January 17, 2021

Several Democratic governors are criticizing the Trump administration for apparently misleading public health officials about holding a stockpile of Covid-19 vaccines in reserve.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said on Tuesday that the government would begin releasing doses of vaccine that were being held in “physical reserve” to ensure enough supply for second doses.

Both federally approved vaccines, made by Pfizer and Moderna, are administered in two shots spaced several weeks apart.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that despite Azar’s comments, no such federal stockpile of vaccines exists. The newspaper, citing state and federal officials, said the Trump administration had already started shipping its available supply in December.

The Democratic state leaders say the lack of a federal reserve will upset plans to increase the speed and scope of their vaccination campaigns.

“Last night, I received disturbing news, confirmed to me directly by General Perna of Operation Warp Speed: States will not be receiving increased shipments of vaccines from the national stockpile next week, because there is no federal reserve of doses,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown wrote in a post on Twitter, referring to Army Gen. Gus Perna, the chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed.

“This

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Health Secretary Alex Azar resigning on Jan. 20

Carrens January 16, 2021

Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar at the White House on August 23, 2020 in Washington, DC.

Pete Marovich | Getty Images

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is resigning on Jan 20, the same day President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.

In his resignation letter dated Jan. 12, Azar took a parting shot at President Donald Trump, mentioning the riot at the U.S. Capitol last week, where a violent mob of Trump’s supporters breached the building, injuring dozens of police officers and causing five deaths.

Azar wrote that “the actions and rhetoric following the election, especially during the past week, threaten to tarnish” the legacies of this administration. “The attacks on the Capitol were an assault on our democracy and on the tradition of peaceful transitions of power that the United States first brought to the world.”

Azar’s resignation came after U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and several other Trump administration officials resigned after the president was accused of inciting the violence by directing protesters to head to the U.S. Capitol where lawmakers were finalizing Biden’s win. The mob descended on the Capitol building Wednesday shortly after proceedings began to count the Electoral College votes and

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Biden unveils sweeping plan to fight pandemic in the U.S.

Carrens January 15, 2021

Covid plan: Biden unveils sweeping plan to fight pandemic in the U.S.

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In Search of a Baby, I Got Covid Instead

Melissa Jenn January 14, 2021

As a health care journalist in Los Angeles reporting on the pandemic, I knew exactly what I needed to do once I landed in the hospital with covid pneumonia: write my goodbye emails.

I’d seen coverage of some final covid messages during this terrible year. They were usually directed to spouses, but my No. 1 concern was how to explain my own death to my 3-year-old, Marigold, whom we call “Goldie.” How much of me would she remember, and how would she make peace with what happened to me, when I could barely believe it myself?

After the emergency room doctor confirmed pneumonia in both of my lungs on Dec. 17, I was whisked upstairs to the hospital’s covid unit, where I got a blood thinner injection, infusions of steroids and remdesivir, and continued on the supplemental oxygen they had started in the ER.

Immediately after the treatments, my mind was clearer and more focused than it had been in the nine days since my husband, daughter and I had all received positive covid results (and when my raging fevers began). As I lay in my hospital bed, my roommate’s TV blaring, I started thinking about my daughter’s understanding of

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