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“วัคซีนเหล่านี้จะถูกจัดหาให้กับบุคลากรทางการแพทย์และผู้ปฏิบัติงานที่มีความเสี่ยงในระดับแนวหน้าในลาว” บุนคง สีหะวงรัฐมนตรีว่าการกระทรวงสาธารณสุขกล่าวกับ Laotian Times
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Senior Democrats to announce $3,000-per-child benefit as Biden stimulus gains steam
InternationalFeb 08. 2021House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks with Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., and other members of Congress to discuss the first impeachment vote against President Donald Trump in Washington in 2019. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Melina Mara
By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein
WASHINGTON – Senior Democrats on Monday will unveil legislation to provide $3,000 per child to tens of millions of American families, aiming to make a major dent in child poverty as part of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief package.
The 22-page bill to dramatically expand direct cash benefits to American families was obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release.
Under the proposal, the Internal Revenue Service would provide $3,600 over the course of the year per child under the age of 6, as well as $3,000 per child of ages 6 to 17. The size of the benefit would diminish for Americans earning more than $75,000 per year, as well as for couples jointly earning more than $150,000 per year. The payments would be sent monthly beginning in July, a delay intended to give the IRS time to prepare for the massive new initiative.
The bill, spearheaded by Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, emerges as congressional Democrats accelerate their plans to enact Biden’s stimulus plan within weeks. It also comes days after Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, surprised policymakers with a proposal to send even more in direct cash per child to American families, lending bipartisan support to the major push for child benefits.
Biden’s proposed child benefit has quickly emerged as a potentially defining feature of his administration’s economic agenda – one that could make a lasting imprint on American welfare policy. Its execution could also prove crucial to deciding Democrats’ ability to maintain control of Congress, given its likely direct impact on the lives of tens of millions of voters.
Despite Romney’s support, several Republican lawmakers and conservative scholars have started criticizing similar measures because they would give government aid both to working and nonworking Americans alike. That has set the stage for a major political clash over the new benefits.
Biden’s plan has been estimated to cost upward of $120 billion per year, which would add to the national deficit as part of the Democrats’ broader package.
“The pandemic is driving families deeper and deeper into poverty, and it’s devastating. … This money is going to be the difference in a roof over someone’s head or food on their table,” Neal said in a statement. “This is how the tax code is supposed to work for those who need it most.”
America has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in part because it spends less on child benefits than almost any other. Neal’s plan would only create the new benefit for one year, but congressional Democrats and White House officials have said they would push for the policy to be made permanent later in the year.
White House officials and Senate Democrats have reviewed Neal’s legislation and are supportive of the proposal. Aides cautioned some of its details may change between now and final passage of the legislation. It is also unclear whether Democrats can pass the new child benefit through the Senate under the rules of reconciliation, the parliamentary procedure they are using to pass Biden’s stimulus without Republican votes.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said she is aiming to pass Biden’s relief package, which would include the child benefit, through the House within two weeks.
An analysis by Columbia University researchers of Biden’s proposal found it would cut the number of children in poverty by as much as 54 percent, the equivalent of 5 million children. More than 1 million Black children would be lifted out of poverty by the plan, the researchers found.
“Of all the policy issues being discussed this Congress, of all the things we are working on, the biggest impact we can make for economic justice in our country – and enact measurable transformational change – lies within this policy that would slash child poverty,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who has been involved in similar efforts in the Senate, in an interview.
The White House called generally for an expansion of the Child Tax Credit in its initial stimulus proposal, largely leaving how to do so to congressional Democrats.
Neal’s office has now filled in those details. Under his bill, the IRS would base eligibility for the payments on families’ prior year income, which is also similar to how it sent out stimulus payments last year. The legislation would create an online portal, managed by the Treasury Department, for families to update their incomes if their annual incomes decline and they became eligible for the payment as a result.
The IRS would begin sending out payments July 1 in a similar fashion to how it sent out the stimulus payments, directly depositing the payments in taxpayers’ bank accounts. Crucially, the benefits would not be deducted off taxpayers’ existing tax liability, meaning American parents would still receive $250 per month per child – or $300 per month per young children – even if they have an existing tax obligation with the IRS.
The benefits will also be delivered monthly in an attempt to help poorer parents facing fluctuations of income. That may be difficult for the IRS to achieve. Treasury officials have told Democratic lawmakers that they will do their best to implement the program. But concerns remain about the capacity of the tax agency to stand up the new benefit during a pandemic and filing season that has already stretched the IRS thin.
Congress has also substantially cut IRS funding over the past decade, largely due to Republican efforts to curb its influence. The Democratic plan calls for substantially increasing funding for the IRS to implement the plan, although the precise amount remains unclear. It also says Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen can adjust the monthly payment structure if she decides it is “not administratively feasible” and instead deliver the payments at the “shortest interval” that is.
Neal’s plan also creates a “safe harbor” provision for parents who are mistakenly sent the benefit. Many parents who are caring for a child one year may not the next, but since eligibility is based on prior year income the IRS may still send them a check anyway. The “safe harbor” provision aims to prevent parents of poorer and moderate incomes from being saddled with a surprise bill at tax time because the IRS incorrectly assumed they were owed the child benefit, excluding them from requirements to pay the bill back at the end of the year.
The Neal plan represents an expansion of an existing $2,000 Child Tax Credit under current law, both through extending it to low-income families and by making it more generous. Under Neal’s plan, the phaseout parameters for this existing $2,000 would not change. Lowering the income requirement for that $2,000 would reduce its value for more affluent families, and violate Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on families with below $400,000 in annual income.
Some policy experts fear Neal’s plan could create unnecessary administrative complications for families with sharp fluctuations in income.
Chye-Ching Huang, executive director of the New York University Tax Law Center, said on Twitter that numerous countries with similar child benefit programs have “caused massive hardship and (& political firestorm)” by creating surprise end-of-year bills for families who were incorrectly disbursed the payment over the year.
She cited the case of Australia, where in 2015 about 350,000 families were overpaid benefits and faced aggressive debt-collection tactics.
“The basic point is that you want to do everything possible to avoid creating this type of hardship for families. Safe harbors should be very robust,” she wrote on Twitter.
Romney’s proposed expansion of child benefits would have sent payments to every American, regardless of their income, through the Social Security Administration. Under Romney’s plan, child benefits that went to affluent households would then be clawed back at tax filing time by the IRS.
By instead tethering the benefit payments to annual income, Democrats risk creating an administrative headache for both the IRS and taxpayers, said Sam Hammond, a policy expert at the right-leaning Niskanen Center who helped craft Romney’s plan. The diminishing size of the benefit may mean the IRS would deposit checks worth as little as $10 in the bank accounts of more affluent Americans.
Romney’s plan included the elimination of an existing federal welfare program and cuts to food stamp benefits, which Neal’s proposal would not.
“There is something symbolically important about this being a universal child benefit,” Hammond said. “Overall, Neal’s plan would be, unequivocally, a massive win against child poverty. But it could do more to clean up the administrative complexity of the current system by making the payment universal.”
Booker said he supported the push to making the program more universal but resisted the idea of endorsing a plan that would send benefits to affluent Americans.
Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-leaning think tank People’s Policy Project, warned tying the benefit to prior year status would mean some families receive too much or too little money if they have changes in their number of children, custody, or marital status.
“Since these things cannot be known in advance, the IRS is being instructed to assume each family’s situation is exactly the same as it was the last time they filed taxes,” Bruenig said. “Many families whose circumstances change will end up receiving lower monthly payments than they are eligible for – or find themselves with a massive surprise tax bill at the end of the year.”
Under Neal’s plan, the rules for immigrant children are the same as under existing law, meaning a child needs to have a Social Security Number for the family to receive the benefit but the parents do not. About four million tax returns were filed by those without a Social Security Number before Republicans restricted eligibility in their 2017 tax law.
On the right, conservatives have begun increasingly arguing that the expansion of child benefits represents a dangerous expansion in America’s welfare programs. Scott Winship, director of poverty studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, wrote last week that Romney’s plan would discourage poor Americans from working by giving them government subsidies.
“We know that the negative income tax experiments of the 1970s found that on net, greater benefits led to a sizable decline in employment among single mothers, and research on the state and federal welfare reforms of the 1990s found that, on net, less generous benefits led to more work in the population affected,” Winship said in an email Sunday. “My concern is that the Romney proposal’s incentives for some low-income parents to work more would be weaker than the incentives for some to work less – both because the child allowance benefits can replace earnings foregone but also because the Earned Income Tax Credit that would be available to many single parents under the proposal would be less generous than it is now.”
Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Michael Bennet, D-Colo., have been involved in crafting similar legislation in the Senate, as have Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., in the House.
The White House believes Neal’s plan is consistent with the provisions of his stimulus proposal.
“The President has made it a central priority of his first legislative proposal to cut child poverty in half this year through a child tax credit expansion in the American Rescue Plan, and looks forward to working with members of Congress on this legislation,” a White House spokeswoman said in a statement.
Court documents point to how Trump’s rhetoric fueled rioters who attacked Capitol
InternationalFeb 08. 2021People fight to gain access to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard
By The Washington Post · Rosalind S. Helderman, Rachel Weiner, Spencer S. Hsu
WASHINGTON – Storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was no spur-of-the-moment decision for Jessica Marie Watkins, an Ohio bartender and founder of a small, self-styled militia, federal prosecutors allege.
In documents charging her with conspiracy and other crimes for her role in the insurrection, they say she began planning such an operation shortly after former president Donald Trump lost the November election, ultimately helping recruit and allegedly helping lead dozens of people who took violent action to try to stop congressional certification of the electoral college vote last month.
In text messages cited in court documents, Watkins was clear about why she was heading to Washington. “Trump wants all able bodied patriots to come,” she wrote to one of her alleged co-conspirators on Dec. 29, eight days before prosecutors say they invaded the building.
The question of what exactly motivated Watkins and other alleged rioters – and when their plans took shape – will be among the central questions of Trump’s impeachment trial this week, when the Senate will consider whether to convict the former president on charges that he incited the crowd to attack the Capitol.
The nine House impeachment managers leading Trump’s prosecution made clear in an 80-page brief filed last week that they will argue that his role in inspiring the crowd to action began long before the 70-minute speech he gave that day.
They assert that the violence was virtually inevitable after Trump spent months falsely claiming that the election had been stolen from him.
“He amplified these lies at every turn, seeking to convince supporters that they were victims of a massive electoral conspiracy that threatened the Nation’s continued existence,” the House impeachment managers wrote.
After refusing to take the “honorable path” and admit defeat in the election, they wrote, Trump “summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Evidence to bolster the Democratic case has emerged in federal criminal cases filed against more than 185 people in the aftermath of the insurrection.
Trump’s pull on his supporters is a dominant theme. Court documents show that more than two dozen people charged in the attack specifically cited Trump and his calls to gather that day in describing on social media or in conversations with others why they decided to take action by coming to Washington.
Even when Trump is not cited by name, filings in dozens of other cases show how alleged rioters were broadly motivated by his rhetoric about a stolen election – including his false claims that Vice President Mike Pence could have used his ceremonial role to stop the counting of the electoral college votes.
And some came primed for battle.
According to prosecutors, Pittsburg QAnon adherent Kenneth Grayson wrote to an associate on Dec. 23: “I’m there for the greatest celebration of all time after Pence leads the Senate flip!! OR IM THERE IF TRUMP TELLS US TO STORM THE FUKIN CAPITAL IMA DO THAT THEN!”
Grayson has been accused of trespassing into the Capitol and charged with five felonies. A lawyer for Grayson did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s lawyers have denied that his attacks on the 2020 election can be proved false – or that his comments in the run-up to Jan. 6 or at his rally that day constituted incitement.
“The 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect,” attorneys Bruce Castor and David Schoen wrote in a response to the trial summons.
In addition to arguing that the Constitution does not allow a former president to be tried in a Senate impeachment proceeding, Trump’s defenders have sought to parse the language of the fiery speech he delivered shortly before the riot. His lawyers argue that while Trump called on the crowd to “march” to the Capitol, he did not urge them to attack and, at one point, asked them to act “peacefully.”
And they have sought to focus just on his remarks that day. In a tweet last month, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. wrote that if some rioters were planning an attack in advance, then “POTUS didn’t incite anything.”
Barring a dramatic development, House impeachment managers appear unlikely to secure a conviction. A majority of Republican senators have signaled that they plan to vote against such a move.
But Democrats hope to lay out a compelling case to the country of Trump’s responsibility for the insurrection.
They say Trump’s address on Jan. 6 could be shown to constitute “incitement” under criminal law – which the Supreme Court has said requires showing that speech was “directed” and “likely” to produce “imminent lawless action.”
On Sunday, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who voted to impeach Trump, called the Senate trial only a “snapshot” and said Trump’s actions should be examined as part of ongoing criminal investigations.
“People will want to know exactly what the president was doing. They want to know, for example, whether the tweet he sent out calling Vice President Pence a coward while the attack was underway, whether that tweet, for example, was a premeditated effort to provoke violence,” she said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There are a lot of questions that have to be answered, and there will be many, many criminal investigations looking at every aspect of this and everyone who was involved, as there should be.”
In the Senate, House impeachment managers will argue that regardless of the criminal investigation, Trump’s actions before, during and after the riot represent an assault on democracy that amounts to the kind of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that should cause a commander in chief to be convicted by the Senate under the Constitution and barred from holding public office again.
House managers have cited videos taken in the crowd, which show that after Trump exhorted the group to “show strength,” people could be heard shouting, “Take the Capitol right now!” and “Invade the Capitol!”
In their brief, they quoted from videos taken inside the Capitol, where one rioter exclaimed, “We wait and take orders from our president!” and another taunted a police officer, “We were invited here . . . by the president of the United States!”
Some defense attorneys have echoed those arguments, saying those who participated in the attack were doing so at the behest of Trump.
“You have these people who were vulnerable, who were receptive, who were euphoric,” said Al Watkins, an attorney representing Jacob Chansley, who was photographed in the well of the Senate chamber, wearing a headdress of animal fur and horns. “What these people heard, including my client, was an invitation, a call to arms by the president.”
Watkins said Trump led otherwise reasonable and law-abiding people such as Chansley into an “abyss” through “relentless” use of social media to propagate false information.
“But for the president, they would not have walked down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he added. “They believed the president was going with them. They thought they were helping the president save our country.”
The Federal Public Defender’s Office for Washington, which is representing many of those charged, declined to comment on individual cases. But A.J. Kramer, chief of the office, said he expected that there may be arguments in court that Trump bore “full responsibility for encouraging the rally, inciting them and telling them he would lead them” to overturn the results of the election.
Defense attorneys may say Trump “told them to march up Pennsylvania Avenue, and he’d be leading them, and he’s the commander in chief of the military and the nation’s top law enforcement officer,” Kramer said, adding: “I can’t speak for any particular individual, but I certainly think it’s going to play a large role in a number of the cases.”
Many of those charged indicated that they felt called to duty on Jan. 6, court documents show.
William Wright Watson told an FBI agent that he had driven overnight from his home in Auburn, Ala., to the nation’s capital to “support the patriots, support Trump, support freedom,” documents show.
The day before he allegedly stormed the Capitol, Samuel Fisher posted on Facebook that “At 1 when congress certifies the election . . . Trump just needs to fire the bat signal . . . deputize patriots . . . and then the pain comes.”
Texas winery owner Christopher Ray Grider, who was charged with destruction of government property and other crimes, told a local television station that he went to Washington because “the president asked people to come and show their support. I feel like it’s the least that we can do,” court filings note.
He added that he had been within feet of fellow rioter Ashli Babbitt when she attempted to crawl through a broken window into the barricaded Speaker’s Lobby and was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer.
Grider’s attorney, Brent Mayr, said it’s “surreal” that Grider is incarcerated while “Donald Trump is sitting there down in Florida doing whatever he feels like he wants to do.”
“He supported President Donald Trump. He went there to support the president. Did he ever anticipate what was going to happen was going to happen? Absolutely not,” Mayr said in an interview.
Trump tweeted repeatedly about the Jan. 6 gathering, exhorting his supporters to come to Washington as a way to pressure Congress – and his rallying cry was effective, court documents show.
On Dec. 19, more than two weeks before the rally, Trump tweeted, “Big Protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”
Beverly Hills, Calif., salon owner Gina Bisignano quickly responded on Twitter: “I’ll be there.”
Mark Sahady, an organizer from Boston, tweeted that his group “will be in DC once again on January 6th to get wild.”
In Montana, Henry Philip Munzter posted Trump’s tweet to Facebook with a note: “I will be going to Washington DC. Anyone that would like join me let know.”
All three have been charged with storming the building.
Some defense attorneys representing people charged with crimes related to the insurrection have indicated that they plan to use Trump’s words in court to try to argue that their clients could not have known that their actions were illegal.
Sahady’s attorney, Rinaldo Del Gallo, said he will argue that Sahady thought he was allowed to enter the Capitol, in part because of Trump’s speech. “The fact that the president said go to the Capitol, and he’s the executive – it’s not like John on the street saying it, he’s the president – is of some relevance,” he said.
As the crowd chanted, “Fight for Trump!” at the rally that day, Trump told the group, “we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue – I love Pennsylvania Avenue – and we are going to the Capitol.”
But Trump returned to the White House while a mob of his supporters stormed metal barricades surrounding the building.
Brandi Harden, a lawyer for Emanuel Jackson, a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man accused of attacking police officers with fists and a baseball bat, wrote in a recent court motion that Jackson is “mentally challenged,” has no criminal history, owns no cellphone and recently lost his home. She wrote that he was “inspired by inflammatory propaganda.”
Arguing that Jackson should be released from jail on bond, she said his actions were “spontaneous and sparked by the statements made during the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally.” Hardin did not respond to a request for comment.
Others who allegedly planned to invade the Capitol also appear to have been influenced by Trump’s nonstop assault on the integrity of the election – and by his depiction of Jan. 6 as a final showdown.
By the time Congress gathered in a joint session that day, Trump had entertained all kinds of extralegal ways of retaining office, including pressuring Republican officials to change their states’ results and weighing a proposal to use the military to rerun the election in key counties. On social media, die-hard supporters were calling for him to invoke the Insurrection Act and mobilize the military and the National Guard.
Jessica Marie Watkins, a U.S. Army veteran and volunteer firefighter from Ohio, was charged together with two others with conspiring to “stop, delay, and hinder Congress’s certification of the electoral college vote.”
Prosecutors say she was affiliated with the Oath Keepers, a national self-styled militia group, and founded a smaller, local paramilitary organization called Ohio State Regular Militia. They accused her of helping to train other rioters, organizing their travel and then storming the building in a coordinated fashion while wearing a bulletproof vest and other tactical gear.
“We have about 30-40 of us. We are sticking together and sticking to the plan,” Watkins said through a walkie-talkie software app while the breach was underway, according to court documents.
A lawyer for Watkins declined to comment, and her boyfriend did not respond to requests for comment. An attorney for another man charged with Watkins denied that he was involved with planning or coordinating action to storm the building.
In her text message exchange with an alleged co-conspirator on Dec. 29, Watkins described her hopes for how Jan. 6 might turn out – and why she felt she had to take part.
“If Trump activates the Insurrection Act,” she wrote, “I’d hate to miss it.”
Majority of Americans approve of Biden’s coronavirus response, poll finds
InternationalFeb 08. 2021President Joe Biden leaves the White House on Friday, Feb. 5, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · Brittany Shammas
WASHINGTON – Two in 3 Americans approve of President Joe Biden’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a poll by ABC News-Ipsos, with widespread support for his efforts to pass a relief bill.
The survey was conducted Feb. 5 and 6 among 508 adults using the probability-based KnowledgePanel. Biden’s 67% approval on handling the coronavirus contrasts sharply with how Americans felt President Donald Trump handled the pandemic. In October, 61% said they disapproved of Trump’s response to the coronavirus.
Biden earned high marks among Democrats and political independents in the new poll, with 96% of Democrats and 67% of independents approving. A third of Republicans, 33%, voiced approval.
The poll found that a majority of Americans favor a new coronavirus aid package, though there is disagreement on how it should be approached. About half, 49%, think Biden should work to pass the $1.9 trillion package with the support of only Democrats in Congress, while 40% said they want him to push for something smaller with the backing of some Republicans.
The Senate on Friday approved a budget bill paving the way for passage of the $1.9 trillion package, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote. With Democrats controlling both houses, Congress has the ability to push the package through without the support of Republicans, who have called for a less expensive measure.
Biden, who has called for a new era of unity and bipartisanship, met last week with a group of 10 Republicans proposing a $618 billion relief package but has not indicated willingness to abandon the $1.9 trillion package. He said Friday that he prefers for the parties to work together but will choose “getting help right now to Americans who are hurting so badly” over “getting bogged down in a lengthy negotiation or compromising on a bill that’s up to the crisis.”
On vaccines, the poll found, 67% believe the distribution process has been fair and 33% believe it has been unfair. Officials in many states have attempted to speed up distribution by prioritizing older age groups over essential workers, pushing back vaccinations of people whose jobs often put them at the highest risk of exposure.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report also found that, among the vaccinated whose race was known, Black people accounted for just over 5%, while 6% were Asian and 11.5% were Latino.
The ABC-Ipsos survey sought participants’ views on whether Trump should be convicted in the Senate and barred from holding public office in future. A slight majority, 56%, favored conviction, though opinions fell along party lines: 9 in 10 Democrats supported conviction, while more than 8 in 10 Republicans opposed it.
The coronavirus variant that shut down much of the United Kingdom is spreading rapidly across the United States, outcompeting other mutant strains and doubling its prevalence among confirmed infections every week and a half, according to new research made public Sunday.
The report, posted on the preprint server MedRxiv and not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, comes from a collaboration of many scientists and provides the first hard data to support a forecast issued last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed the United Kingdom variant becoming dominant in the U.S. by late March.
The spread of the variant, officially known as B.1.1.7, and the threat of other mutant strains of the virus, have added urgency to the effort to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible. The variant is more contagious than earlier forms of the coronavirus and may also be more lethal, although that is far less certain.
The mutations do not change the fundamental way the virus spreads, and masks and social distancing will continue to be effective in limiting infections, disease experts point out.
“Our study shows that the U.S. is on a similar trajectory as other countries where B.1.1.7 rapidly became the dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant, requiring immediate and decisive action to minimize covid-19 morbidity and mortality,” the authors of the new study write.
Florida stands out in the study as the state with the highest estimated prevalence of the variant. The new report estimated the doubling time of B.1.1.7 prevalence in positive test results at 9.1 days.
Florida leads the nation in reported cases involving B.1.1.7, with has recorded 187 infections involving B.1.1.7 as of Thursday, followed by much-more-populous California with 145 infections, according to the CDC.
The new study only looked at data through the end of January, but the percentage of infections in Florida involving B.1.1.7 may have risen from a little less than 5 percent to approximately 10 percent in just the past week, Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research Institute and a co-author of the new study, said Sunday in an email.
Mary Jo Trepka, an immunologist at Florida International University, said she is not surprised by the spread of the variant in Florida, because the state has not been strict about mask mandates or other restrictions, and it is a hub for international travel. She worries that the variant will reverse recent favorable trends in infection rates.
“We’re in good shape in terms of numbers of cases coming down, the hospitals are doing well. So is that going to reverse because we’re seeing these variants?” she said. “The message is that we have to work harder to prevent transmission of all these cases of covid. If we don’t we’ll potentially see more variants. We need to get everybody vaccinated and we need to do a much better job at preventing transmission.”
The B.1.1.7 variant carries a package of mutations, including many which change the structure of the spike protein on the surface of the virus and enhance its ability to bind to human receptor cells. People infected with the variant have higher viral loads, studies have shown, and they may shed more virus when coughing or sneezing.
Last’s month’s CDC forecast was based on a simple model that extrapolated from trends in the United Kingdom. The new research posted Sunday confirms the forecast trend through the end of January. The researchers scrutinized genomic analyses of the virus samples from 10 states, including from 212 infections involving the variant.
The report concludes that the variant has been 35 to 45 percent more transmissible than other strains of the virus in the United States.
“It is here, it’s got its hooks deep into this country, and it’s on its way to very quickly becoming the dominant lineage,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the new paper.
The United States is just emerging from a disastrous winter surge in cases, with new infections and hospitalizations dropping – although the numbers remain higher than they were during the summer surge. The CDC forecast shows that, with a steady rate of a million vaccinations a day, infections will most likely continue to decline even in the presence of the more transmissible variant.
But the decline will be much more gradual than if the variant had not taken hold, according to the CDC’s forecast. And there are other wild cards in play, in the form of additional variants. They include B. 1.351, first seen in South Africa and of elevated concern to the medical community because it contains a mutation (E484K, nicknamed “Eeek”) that limits but does not entirely undermined the efficacy of vaccines.
Even more worrisome is preliminary evidence from a clinical trial in South Africa conducted by Novavax, maker of a successful vaccine, showing that people previously infected by the coronavirus and given a placebo were becoming reinfected with B. 1.351. There was no evidence these follow-on infections were severe or deadly, but authorities view the South Africa variant as well as another that emerged first in Brazil as posing a particularly high risk for reinfections.
The United Kingdom variant does not generally include the worrisome “Eeek” mutation, though it has appeared sporadically. A report published recently in the journal Science, based on laboratory research using different variants of the virus, found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine remained effective against B.1.1.7.
But the virus is continuing to mutate, and with transmission at such high levels – both in the United States and globally – the variants have abundant opportunities to change further as they react to the human immune system and to therapies administered to patients with protracted infections.
“We should vaccinate as fast as we can,” said James Lu, a co-author of the new report and president and co-founder of Helix, a genomics company that provided much of the data used in the research.
The new study does not include any data on the South Africa variant because it has been detected in only a handful of cases in the U.S., while the United Kingdom variant has been seen hundreds of times already. The new study concluded that the United Kingdom variant had multiple introductions to the United States by end of November.
The variant first appeared in genomic surveys in the United Kingdom on Sept. 20, but did not get tagged as a “variant of concern” until early December when its rapid spread stunned scientists and spurred lockdowns in southern England.
When the CDC issued its warning last month about B.1.1.7, it was still present in less than one-half of 1 percent of cases. That jumped to about 3.6 percent at the end of January, the new research found. Those numbers remain small, but the new research highlights the exponential increase in prevalence among positive test results – doubling every 9.8 days nationally.
“What concerns me is the exponential growth in the early stages doesn’t look very fast,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine who was not part of the new study. “It kind of putzes along – and then goes boom.”
วัคซีนชุดนี้เป็นของ Sinopharm ยักษ์ใหญ่ด้านเวชภัณฑ์ของจีน ซึ่งเพิ่งจะส่งให้กับกัมพูชาเพียงหนึ่งวันก่อนหน้าที่จะส่งให้ สปป. ลาว
สัญญาณของการกวาดล้างอย่างรุนแรงเริ่มชัดขึ้นมาแล้ว หลังจากที่กองทัพเมียนมาประกาศคำเตือนผ่านสถานีโทรทัศน์ของรัฐและต่อมาตำรวจเตือนให้ผู้ประท้วงสลายการชุมนุม
แอฟริกาใต้ระงับวัคซีน ‘แอสตราเซเนกา’ ชั่วคราวพร้อมหันไปใช้ยี่ห้ออื่น ด้านสหราชอาณาจักรยังคงเชื่อมั่น
โจ ไบเดน เผยความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างสหรัฐและจีนจะเป็นไปในรูปแบบแข่งขันอย่างดุเดือดไม่ใช่ความขัดแย้ง
ตำรวจเริ่มใช้วิธีหนักขึ้นโดยยิงน้ำสลายผู้ประท้วงต่อต้านรัฐประหารในเมืองหลวงเมียนมา
กระทรวงการต่างประเทศของสหราชอาณาจักรประเมินการรัฐประหารในเมียนมาถึงจุดที่หวนกลับไม่ได้แล้ว
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks with Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., and other members of Congress to discuss the first impeachment vote against President Donald Trump in Washington in 2019. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Melina Mara
People fight to gain access to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard
President Joe Biden leaves the White House on Friday, Feb. 5, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
