The number of Covid-19 cases crossed 3.63 million across Southeast Asia, shooting up by 20,213 on Thursday with 272 deaths, compared to 16,861 cases on Wednesday.
Total Covid-19 deaths in Asean since the outbreak last year have risen to 72,267.
Indonesia recorded another day of lower than 4,000 new cases with 3,448 testing positive, while 99 people died on Thursday, taking the national death toll to 47,716. More than 1.5 million Indonesians have been cured and discharged. The Indonesian government has warned people against lowering their guard despite declining infections.
Philippines logged 6,385 new cases, a slight increase from Wednesday, driving cumulative cases in the country to 1,124,724.
The death toll in the Philippines on Thursday was 107, while total fatalities rose to 18,821 and 1,050,643 have been discharged after cure.
The Philippine government announced on Thursday an easing of lockdown measures in Manila and its perimeter effective from May 15-31.
Colonial Pipeline paid hackers nearly $5 million in ransom
Colonial Pipeline Co. paid nearly $5 million to Eastern European hackers on Friday, contradicting reports earlier this week that the company had no intention of paying an extortion fee to help restore the countrys largest fuel pipeline, according to two people familiar with the transaction.
The company paid the hefty ransom in difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, underscoring the immense pressure faced by the Georgia-based operator to get gasoline and jet fuel flowing again to major cities along the Eastern Seaboard, those people said. A third person familiar with the situation said U.S. government officials are aware that Colonial made the payment.
Once they received the payment, the hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said.
A representative from Colonial declined to comment, as did a spokesperson for the National Security Council. Colonial said it began to resume fuel shipments around 5 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday.
The hackers, which the FBI said are linked to a group called DarkSide, specialize in digital extortion and are believed to be located in Russia or Eastern Europe.
On Wednesday, media outlets including the Washington Post and Reuters, also based on anonymous sources, reported that the company had no immediate intention of paying the ransom.
Ransomware is a type of malware that locks up a victim’s files, which the attackers promise to unlock for a payment. More recently, some ransomware groups have also stolen victims’ data and threatened to release it unless paid — a kind of double extortion.
The FBI discourages organizations from paying ransom to hackers, saying there is no guarantee they will follow through on promises to unlock files. It also provides incentive to other would-be hackers, the agency says.
However, Anne Neuberger, the White House’s top cybersecurity official, pointedly declined to say whether companies should pay cyber ransoms at a briefing earlier this week. “We recognize, though, that companies are often in a difficult position if their data is encrypted and they do not have backups and cannot recover the data,” she told reporters Monday.
Such guidance provides a quandary for victims who have to weigh the risks of not paying with the costs of lost or exposed records. The reality is that many choose to pay, in part because the costs may be covered if they have cyber-insurance policies.
“They had to pay,” said Ondrej Krehel, chief executive officer and founder of digital forensics firm LIFARS and a former cyber expert at Loews Corp., which owns Boardwalk Pipeline. “This is a cyber cancer. You want to die or you want to live? It’s not a situation where you can wait.”
Krehel said a $5 million ransom for a pipeline was “very low.” “Ransom is usually around $25 million to $35 million for such a company. I think the threat actor realized they stepped on the wrong company and triggered a massive government response,” he said.
A report released last month by a ransomware task force said the amount paid by victims increased by 311% in 2020, reaching about $350 million in cryptocurrency. The average ransom paid by organizations in 2020 was $312,493, according to report.
Colonial, which operates the largest fuel pipeline in the U.S., became aware of the hack around May 7 and shut down its operations, which led to fuel shortages and lines at gas stations along the East Coast.
Published : May 14, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · William Turton, Michael Riley
More than 1.9 million people could see severe cuts in unemployment aid as Republicans seek to curb assistance
WASHINGTON – More than 1.9 million Americans in Alabama, Mississippi and 14 other Republican-led states are set to have their unemployment checks slashed significantly starting in June, as GOP governors seek to restrict jobless assistance in an effort to force more people to return to work.
The cuts are likely to fall hardest on roughly 1.4 million people who benefit from stimulus programs that Congress adopted at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, including one targeting those who either are self-employed or work on behalf of gig-economy companies such as Uber. Beginning next month, many of these workers are likely to receive no aid at all.
The looming cliff reflects an emerging campaign on the part of GOP leaders to combat what they consider a national worker shortage. Arizona and Ohio became the latest states on Thursday to announce plans to scale back benefits out of a belief that the generous federal payments parceled out over the past year have deterred people from returning to their old positions now that the public-health crisis is waning.
The reality is more complicated, labor experts say. The slowdown in hiring may instead reflect workers’ concern about their safety and difficulty obtaining child care, or their trouble finding suitable positions in hard-hit industries such as tourism on top of mounting frustration about wages they consider too low. That means the loss of unemployment benefits over the next month threatens to inflict new financial harm on those who say they’re already struggling.
At least 16 GOP-led states have announced plans to cut benefits: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming.
Starting next month, more than 557,000 unemployed people in these states are expected to have their payments decrease by $300 each week, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal claims data released Thursday. Millions of Americans have received the extra allotment as a result of a federal stimulus program Congress passed earlier this year. In these 16 GOP-led states, however, out-of-work residents soon will be able to collect only as much as their unemployment insurance programs allowed before the pandemic, which in some parts of the country is well below poverty-level wages.
For a second group of about 863,000 workers, their governors’ cuts mean they stand to lose all of their benefits outright. This includes out-of-work Uber drivers and others who are self employed. These workers had obtained aid for the first time under a second stimulus initiative, known as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), but their states are ending participation in the effort.
A final group of about 513,000 workers who collect traditional unemployment benefits each week similarly may have their assistance reduced to zero. These Americans rely on a federal program that pays them extra weeks of jobless support even if they have exhausted their states’ annual allotments. Republican governors are cutting their participation in this effort as well, leaving workers who have been unemployed for prolonged periods with potentially no more options to obtain aid.
For unemployed workers such as Stephanie Pannell, a 53-year-old single mother in Harrison, Ark., the Republicans’ efforts threatened to deliver another massive financial blow in what already has been a grueling year. The pandemic aid has been a financial lifeline for her and her 14-year-old son, providing $419 a week after taxes – just enough to cover her $700 rent and take care of other living expenses but little else.
On Friday, though, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced that the state plans to cut recipients off the program at the end of June. “For us to lose this is going to be catastrophic, because this is how we’ve made it,” said Pannell, who receives money through the PUA program. “People are like, ‘You don’t want to work.’ Are you crazy? I want to work because I can make a lot more than this pittance. But because of my son’s health, I cannot risk it. . . . They’re acting like they’re giving us gold bullion.”
More governors are expected to follow the lead of Arkansas and other GOP-governed states, which – combined with a recent decline in Americans newly seeking unemployment – could change the number of Americans affected. On Thursday, the Labor Department said that 473,000 Americans had filed new unemployment insurance claims last week, marking another pandemic low.
The state cuts follow a week after the U.S. government reported slower-than-anticipated hiring in April. Even as the country ramped up its efforts to vaccinate millions of Americans – and states began to lift their business restrictions – the economy added only 266,000 jobs last month.
The dour data prompted Republican lawmakers and lobbying groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to call on Washington to rescind its recent unemployment aid. They took aim at the most recent congressional relief package, the American Rescue Plan, claiming that its heightened weekly payments and other benefits had made it prohibitively difficult for employers to fill their open slots.
The White House has maintained that unemployment aid has not contributed to a worker shortage. But President Joe Biden did appear to extend an early concession to his GOP critics this week, promising to “make it clear” that Americans must take a job if they are offered one that is suitable – or risk losing their benefits. States long have maintained such a policy anyway.
Biden’s public comments ultimately did not assuage congressional Republicans, who held a news conference at the Capitol on Thursday where they called on Congress to adopt legislation that would phase out the stimulus programs before they are set to expire this fall. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said he had heard from businesses in his state that say they are struggling to find applicants because jobless benefits are “creating an incentive for people not to return to work.”
“We have a labor crisis in this country,” Rubio said.
With Democrats in control of the House and the Senate, however, the Republicans’ proposal is unlikely to advance. In the meantime, Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., on Thursday encouraged states to act in Washington’s place – stressing that they should “pull the plug so that we don’t need to legislate.”
A slew of Republican-led states have started to trim unemployment insurance on their own, announcing in recent days that they will stop participating in a series of federally funded programs that provide aid to residents still out of a job. The expirations are set to occur throughout June and July, months before Congress had intended, as the GOP governors aim to lessen or eliminate families’ weekly payments to catalyze a local hiring burst.
“Alabama is giving the federal government our 30-day notice that it’s time to get back to work,” Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement announcing her state’s changes this week.
Some of the Republican-led states that plan to reduce benefits actually have few people collecting such aid and lower unemployment rates than the national average. That includes Wyoming, for example, where Gov. Mark Gordon on Wednesday said that plussed-up federal aid is “hindering the pace of our recovery” and contributing to a local worker shortage.
Wyoming’s unemployment rate has remained relatively low in recent months, reaching 5.3%, according to the most recent federal data released last month. Only about 10,000 workers were collecting unemployment aid by mid-April, the Labor Department data show.
Some legal experts think that the Biden administration may be able to continue providing federal benefits despite the GOP’s opposition. The National Employment Law Project (NELP), a worker advocacy legal center and think tank in Washington, wrote a letter to Labor Secretary Marty Walsh on Wednesday outlining some legal options it thinks are feasible to keep federal aid flowing to families in need.
One possibility, the lawyers wrote, is for the Labor Department to require states to continue paying PUA benefits to gig workers and others who are self-employed, arguing that the Cares Act does not allow states to opt out of the program. Without the intervention, NELP advocates warned, people of color and other underrepresented workers would feel a “disparate economic sting,” because they already suffer from higher rates of unemployment.
“We will be stalling the recovery if we cut benefits now, earlier than what Congress intended,” said Nicole Marquez, a director at NELP and one of the authors of the report.
The idea also picked up early traction this week on Capitol Hill, where Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said the Labor Department “needs to look at all options to keep these workers from losing their income.” On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the chairman of the Budget Committee, similarly called on the agency to take action.
“Punishing unemployed workers who lost their jobs during a pandemic through no fault of their own by taking away their unemployment benefits will not improve the economy. It will only make a bad situation even worse,” Sanders said in a statement.
The Labor Department said it was reviewing the letter from NELP.
For some Democrats, the Republican governors’ actions illustrated anew the deficiencies in an unemployment system that allows the states great latitude – sometimes resulting in unsustainable benefits, significant application hiccups and other obstacles to aid. With the economy improving, some party leaders fear that GOP-led states are only just beginning, opening the door for the same sort of massive reductions nationwide that followed the last recession, in 2009.
“This is more of the same in terms of what we saw after the 2009 recession, when you saw states like Florida hollow out [unemployment] benefits, cutting them to the bone,” Wyden said. “This is a far-right Republican governor-led strategy to rip new holes in the safety net.”
Published : May 14, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Tony Romm, Eli Rosenberg
Markets wrap: Stocks climb amid rotation to value; oil declines
Stocks halted a three-day slide, with investors migrating to value from growth companies as signs of a strengthening labor market tempered inflation worries.
Industrial and financial shares led gains in the S&P 500, while energy producers joined a slump in oil. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 underperformed major equity benchmarks as Tesla Inc. slipped after Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said the electric-car maker is suspending purchases using Bitcoin. In late trading, Coinbase Global Inc. sank as the biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange reported revenue below Wall Street estimates.
“We’ve been on cyclical value and small cap for the better part of the last year,” said Brent Schutte, chief investment strategist at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management. “Our forecast has been that you would have these cyclical upswings that would lead to a broadening market, and that is exactly what you’ve seen. We haven’t wavered one bit in our conviction that is going to continue.”
Confidence on an economic revival that’s reigned supreme amid continued Federal Reserve stimulus has been recently jolted. Data Thursday showed producer prices rose by more than forecast in April, and jobless claims fell. While some investors insist the surge in inflation is a one-off reopening burst, the broader markets are hedging against the possibility it may persist and force the central bank to take action.
Officials have been trying to drive home the message that they see inflation spikes this year as transitory, in contrast with heightened Wall Street concern about runaway prices. Increases above the central bank’s 2% goal should be temporary, but may last through 2022, said Fed Governor Christopher Waller.
“Taking a step back from inflation, the fact that jobless claims hit another pandemic-era low suggests we’re inching even closer to full reopening, which is no doubt a good thing,” said Mike Loewengart, managing director of investment strategy at E*Trade Financial.
The Fed tweaked its plans for buying Treasuries, keeping the monthly pace at about $80 billion but focusing more attention on securities maturing in seven years or longer.
These are some of the main moves in markets:
– – –
– The S&P 500 rose 1.2% as of 4 p.m. New York time
– The Nasdaq 100 rose 0.8%
– The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.3%
– The MSCI World index rose 0.3%
– – –
– The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell 0.2%
– The euro was little changed at $1.2084
– The British pound was unchanged at $1.4054
– The Japanese yen rose 0.2% to 109.44 per dollar
– – –
– The yield on 10-year Treasuries declined four basis points to 1.65%
– Germany’s 10-year yield was little changed at -0.12%
– Britain’s 10-year yield advanced one basis point to 0.90%
– – –
– West Texas Intermediate crude fell 3.5% to $64 a barrel
– Gold futures rose 0.3% to $1,828 an ounce
Published : May 14, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Vildana Hajric, Kamaron Leach
Israeli troops enter Gaza strip in presage of ground invasion
JERUSALEM – Israeli troops have crossed into the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said early Friday, as artillery, tanks and war planes joined in a withering assault on the Palestinian enclave, and the Israeli military readied at least three brigades of troops for action, raising the prospect of an all-out ground invasion.
Shortly after midnight, the Israeli military announced that air and ground forces had joined in an attack on Gaza, but a military spokeswoman did not detail the number or type of troops that had crossed the border.
For most of Thursday, the air war between Israelis and Palestinians had raged unabated with casualties continuing to climb on both sides amid rocket fire and airstrikes.
Violence also continued to spread within Israel as officials braced for a fourth night of street unrest that has seen Arab Israelis and right-wing Jewish Israelis fight one another in towns across the country. Israeli politicians from across the ideological spectrum condemned attacks by “vigilantes” from both sides, and commentators warned that the communal upheaval may be harder to stop than the military conflict between Israel and the Hamas militant group, which governs Gaza.
Soon after sunset Thursday, clashes between Jewish and Arab Israelis had resumed in several cities.
The reciprocal bombardment has taken a mounting toll on transportation and other infrastructure in Israel and Gaza. Under a rain of more than 1,700 rockets fired from Gaza, Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, the country’s main link to the outside world, closed indefinitely to incoming flights. Israeli media reported that rockets struck Israel’s secondary Ramon Airport, where flights had been diverted.
In Gaza, damage to power lines cut daily electricity in some parts of the enclave to around three hours. Residents awoke on the normally joyous Eid al-Fitr holiday to pillars of smoke rising from sites bombed by the Israeli military. In the midst of the worst attacks in seven years, streets that would normally bustle with families going to pay holiday visits were quiet.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said 109 Palestinians, including 28 children, had been killed by Thursday night. It said 621 people have been wounded.
On some blocks, displaced residents picked through the rubble of destroyed homes. In northern Gaza City on Thursday morning, Zaher Sbieh pulled two stuffed sheep from what had been a five-story apartment building. They would be a nice surprise for his four children, who are now staying with family in Jabaliya.
The building was demolished by an airstrike Wednesday afternoon, 90 minutes after Sbieh’s brother, who lived in an apartment next door, got an urgent call: Get out now. The call was from an Israeli military officer, Sbieh said. The officer said the building next door was a target. The brothers and their families joined the panicked rush down the stairs as the building emptied. When he returned later that evening, it was gone.
“I lost everything, my clothing, books, laptops, photo albums,” said Sbieh, 48, who runs a youth and community advocacy group. “I evacuated with the clothes I’m wearing.”
Mohammad Qadada, 31, said that the Israeli demolition of the 13-story Hanadi building, which houses his IT company’s offices, has caused him, for the first time, to consider leaving the Gaza Strip.
“I always said, ‘I can’t leave my country, I can’t leave my country.” But now, I can’t be in my country,” said Qadada, who plans to try obtaining Swedish citizenship through his Swedish-born wife.
“We lived through the first war in Gaza in 2008; it was the worst one. But, for me, the past two days are worse than ever because I have a family. When you look at your son who is crying from the bombing, my wife’s tears, my mother’s tears, it is exhausting,” he said.
In Israel, where seven people – six civilians and one soldier – have been killed since the rocketing began on Monday, families were also counting their losses. The slain civilians include a teenage girl and a young boy who died Wednesday evening from an earlier rocket strike on the family’s bomb shelter in Sderot near the border with Gaza, local media reported.
Late Thursday, Lebanese media reported rockets being fired from southern Lebanon toward Israel. Israel’s military said three rockets had landed in the Mediterranean Sea. A media liaison for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has repeatedly battled Israeli forces, declined to comment on the attack, and Israeli media reported that the rockets had been fired by Palestinians in Lebanon.
The prospect of even fiercer fighting seemed to grow Thursday as two Israeli infantry brigades and an armored one readied for ground operations, according to Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus. No orders to invade Gaza have been given, he added, but the troops are preparing for the possibility. Israeli troops last entered Gaza en masse during a two-month war in 2014, when more than 2,200 Gazans were killed.
The Palestinians were also talking tough. “We have much more to give,” a Hamas spokesman known as Abu Obaida said in a televised statement. “The decision to hit Tel Aviv, Dimona and Jerusalem is easier for us than drinking water. Your technology and assassinations don’t scare us.”
Diplomats from the Middle East, Europe and the United States scrambled to broker a cease-fire before the conflict took another devastating turn. Arabic media reported that an Egyptian delegation arrived in Tel Aviv on Thursday. Hady Amr, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Israel and Palestinian affairs, was also on his way, the State Department said.
In remarks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made clear that he places more blame on Hamas, saying there is a “fundamental difference between a terrorist organization in Hamas that is indiscriminately targeting civilians and Israel, which is defending itself.” Blinken and President Joe Biden’s refrain that Israel has a right to defend itself has come under criticism from several liberal American lawmakers.
Even as Israeli troops were readied for action in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would separately deploy the military in restive Israeli towns to quell the “anarchy.” He said he has ordered police to adopt “emergency powers” and intends to “bring in military forces according to the existing law, and we will pass an additional law if necessary.”
“What is happening in Israel’s cities over the past few days is unacceptable,” Netanyahu said on Twitter of the worst Jewish-Arab violence inside Israel in decades. “We have seen Arab rioters set fire to synagogues and vehicles and attack police officers. They are attacking peaceful and innocent citizens.”
The prime minister also alluded to video footage of a group of Jewish nationalists dragging a man whom they believed to be Arab out of his car and beating him in the central city of Bat Yam. “Nothing justifies this and I will tell you that nothing justifies the lynching of Jews by Arabs and nothing justifies the lynching of Arabs by Jews.”
Not long after he spoke, police reported two people injured in a shooting in the central city of Lod, according to The Associated Press. The mixed Arab-Jewish town has become a center of unrest after the fatal shooting of an Arab Israeli man this week, and it remains under heavy police patrol and nighttime lockdown.
About 400 people were arrested overnight Wednesday in riots throughout the country, according to Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. He said 36 officers were injured. Officials said they expected the clashes to continue into Friday, when thousands of Muslim worshipers are expected at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque.
The conflict was triggered after clashes earlier this month in Jerusalem among Palestinians, Israeli police and right-wing Jews. Tensions have been running high, in part, because of efforts by Israeli settlers to evict several Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Published : May 14, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Steve Hendrix, Shira Rubin, Michael E. Miller
CDC says fully vaccinated Americans no longer need masks indoors or outdoors in most cases
WASHINGTON – Americans who are fully vaccinated can go without masks or physical distancing in most cases, even when they are indoors or in large groups, federal officials said Thursday, paving the way for a full reopening of society.
The change represents a huge shift symbolically and practically for pandemic-weary Americans, millions of whom have lived with the restrictions for more than a year. A growing number have complained they cannot do more even after being fully vaccinated and criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for being overly cautious. More than 154 million Americans have had at least one shot and 117 million are fully vaccinated, about 35% of the population.
“We have all longed for this moment when we can get back to some sense of normalcy,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a briefing. “Based on the continuing downward trajectory of cases, the scientific data on the performance of our vaccines and our understanding of how the virus spreads, that moment has come for those who are fully vaccinated.”
Walensky cited a growing body of real-world evidence demonstrating the efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines and noted the shots offer protection even against more contagious variants circulating in the United States. She also noted the rarity of breakthrough infections in those who are fully vaccinated and the lesser severity of the relatively few infections that have occurred.
She did leave open the possibility that the restrictions could return should the pandemic worsen. “This past year has shown us that this virus can be unpredictable,” she said.
The relaxation of masking does not apply to airplanes, buses, trains and other public transportation, to health-care settings, or where state or local restrictions still require them, Walensky said. Officials also noted that some business settings may require masks, especially since some workers may remain unvaccinated.
Walensky urged those who are immune-compromised to speak with their doctors before giving up their masks, and said that those who are not vaccinated remain at risk for mild or severe illness and death and should still wear masks.
“The science is . . . very clear about unvaccinated people,” she said. “You remain at risk of mild or severe illness of death of spreading the disease to others. You should still mask and you should get vaccinated right away.”
The updated guidance means that millions of fully vaccinated Americans can begin returning to pre-pandemic activities, including in-person school and work, which many have eschewed since March 2020. Individuals are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot or the second dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.
In part as a result of that mass vaccination effort, the country is seeing the lowest number of new daily cases it has had in eight months, and deaths have decreased from a high of about 3,000 per day on average in January, to about 600 per day, as many of the most vulnerable, including the elderly, have been inoculated.
“This is a day that I think will be marked as a true turning point in the pandemic in the United States,” said Richard Besser, former acting director of the CDC and president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The idea that people who are fully vaccinated can take off their masks, can go outside, can go inside, be around people and not have to worry about covid anymore, that’s absolutely huge.”
Appearing in the White House Rose Garden without a mask Thursday afternoon, President Biden celebrated the update as “a great day for America” and said fully vaccinated people can shake hands and hug again without fear of contracting covid-19. Biden had been criticized for wearing a mask during his recent speech to Congress.
The president, who has set a goal that 70% of American adults be vaccinated by July Fourth, also praised those who had gotten the shots. “When your country asked you to get vaccinated, you did,” he said. “The American people stepped up. You did what I consider to be your patriotic duty. That’s how we have gotten to this day.”
Still, the guidelines left many unanswered questions, especially for businesses struggling with how to protect employees when they return to the workplace, essential workers who have frequent contact with the public and the parents of children younger than 12 who are still ineligible for the shots.
One leading business group said the updated guidance underscores the uncertainty faced by companies trying to decide precautions in the absence of a uniform standard.
Harold Kim, president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform. said commercial establishments have faced an evolving set of federal, state and local guidelines throughout the pandemic – sometimes at odds with one another. “We never had a playbook,” he said.
A union representing 1.3 million grocery and retail workers criticized the guidance as confusing and said it failed to consider the impact on essential workers who face frequent exposure to individuals who are not vaccinated and refuse to wear masks.
“Millions of Americans are doing the right thing and getting vaccinated, but essential workers are still forced to play mask police for shoppers who are unvaccinated and refuse to follow local COVID safety measures,” said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers. “Are they now supposed to become the vaccination police?”
A public health law expert said the CDC “has now lurched from overcaution to abandoning caution.”
“It’s clear that outdoor activity is safe without masks and distancing, but indoor venues still pose risks,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and Georgetown University Law Center. “The difference between a supermarket, a restaurant or a gym (where masks aren’t required) and an airport (where they are) doesn’t make sense and isn’t supported by science.”
The new CDC guidance is likely to be echoed by state and local governments, who typically follow the lead of federal health officials, said Michael Fraser, chief executive of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents public health agencies.
Fraser called the policy “a sensible approach, knowing what we know today, which is different from what we knew two months ago or six months ago.”
Federal, state and local officials have worked to counter vaccine indifference or hesitancy by sending out mobile clinics to rural and other hard-to-reach areas and administering vaccinations at sports games and offering incentives such as free tickets, beer, and hunting licenses for those who get a shot.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, upped the ante Wednesday by saying that five state residents who are vaccinated could win $1 million in a vaccination lottery; he announced a separate drawing for vaccinated teenagers who will be eligible for a full four-year scholarship to state universities.
The Biden administration is also working to boost vaccine education to persuade those who are hesitant to get the shots.
“There’s still work to be done to help people who are questioning, or [who] don’t trust the vaccines. And I’m hoping some of this attention to the ability to do more will motivate some,” said Julie Morita, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a member of Biden’s transition covid-19 task force.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who had grilled Walensky about what Collins had described as overly restrictive guidance at a hearing earlier this week, praised the mask update, but said it was overdue.
“It’s so important that people be able to have confidence in CDC’s guidelines because otherwise they won’t follow them,” Collins said, adding the agency had “lagged the science and the overwhelming opinion of public health experts” on wearing masks outside and on its recommendations for summer camps.
In its summer camp guidance, the CDC has said that masks should be worn by vaccinated adults and children at all times, including outdoors, except when swimming and eating.
Collins, who acknowledged that Maine is a major location for summer camps, called on the agency to update that as well. She noted that children 12 years old and over can now be vaccinated, and that even though younger children can’t get the shots, almost all camp activities are outdoors.
Children under 12 years old who are unvaccinated still need to take precautions, including wearing a well-fitted mask, and the agency is looking to update its guidance for camps soon, said CDC spokesman Jason McDonald.
Others shared Collins’ view that the update was overdue but lauded that it was done.
“This is an important recognition that the level of covid risk for most people has fallen substantially,” said Scott Gottlieb, an FDA commissioner under President Donald Trump. “. . . We’re well served by CDC’s move today to relax their guidance and give a green light to those who felt bound by their mandates.”
Carlos del Rio, professor of medicine at Emory University in Atlanta, said he believed the update would persuade more people to get the shots.
“Young people say, ‘Why should I get vaccinated? I’m not going to die of this.’ What they want to hear is, ‘You can take your mask off,'” del Rio said, adding that it doesn’t help to promote vaccinations if officials tell people to “get vaccinated, but do the same thing.”
Others defended the CDC, saying it had to move cautiously with a new and unpredictable virus, and arguing that updated guidance was appropriate only after there was sufficient evidence the vaccines were as effective in the real world as they had been in clinical trials.
“To expect the CDC to be nimble and make decisions before it gets the data it needs would be a big mistake,” Fraser said.
Jason Schwartz, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Yale School of Public Health, acknowledged mixed messages from the CDC but said that reflected “earlier stages of the pandemic and earlier stages of our knowledge about how the virus transmitted.”
Published : May 14, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Yasmeen Abutaleb, Laurie McGinley
Biden announces $7.4 billion to hire more public health workers amid pandemic
WASHINGTON – The White House announced Thursday that it is investing $7.4 billion to hire more public health workers to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and future health crises. The money will come from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which Congress passed in March.
The funds could give a much-needed boost to America’s crumbling public health infrastructure. After decades of chronic underfunding, U.S. public health departments last year showed how ill-equipped they are to carry out basic functions, let alone serve as the last line of defense against the most acute threat to the nation’s health in generations.
The Biden administration said $4.4 billion will go toward boosting states’ overstretched public health departments, allowing them to hire disease specialists to do contact tracing, case management, and support outbreak investigations and school nurses to help schools reopen. Some of the money will also go to expanding the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – which plays a critical role in containing outbreaks.
The remaining $3 billion will be used to create a new grant program to train and modernize the country’s public health workforce. Applicants for those grants will be asked to prioritize recruiting staff from the communities they will serve, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds.
In the years before the pandemic struck, local public health agencies had lost almost a quarter of their overall workforce since 2008 – a reduction of almost 60,000 workers, according to national associations of health officials. The agencies’ main source of federal funding – the CDC’s emergency preparedness budget – had been cut 30 percent since 2003.
A new report published this month by the nonprofit Trust for America’s Health found that the underfunding of U.S. public health played an outsized role in the country’s disastrous response.
In the wake of the pandemic, America has spent trillions of dollars. Much of that could have saved if the nation had just spent a few billion more on public health in the previous years, the report found.
“Unfortunately, a pattern has emerged: the country temporarily pays attention to public health investment when there is a crisis and then moves on when the emergency passes,” the report concluded. “This boom-bust cycle has left the nation’s public health infrastructure on weak footing.”
Among the report’s recommendations is that Congress establish an annual, regularly occurring $4.5 billion infusion to public health to prepare for future crises, including the next pandemic.
A majority of America supports such funding, according to a poll released Thursday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The poll found 71% of the public favors substantially increasing federal spending on improving the nation’s public health programs. In addition, 72% said they believe the activities of public health agencies in the United States are extremely or very important to the health of the United States.
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