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9 p.m. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the federal government is increasing the supply of COVID-19 vaccine doses by 20% for the next three weeks and decided that local governments can dictate the further expansion of the phase 1b vaccination group. The governor says he will let local municipalities choose whether to offer vaccines to restaurant workers, taxi drivers, and those in developmentally disabled facilities. I’m leaving it up to the local governments to determine what fits their situation, he said during a Tuesday press conference that followed Mayor de Blasio s. A spokesman for de Blasio said, We’re glad that the discussion around expanding eligibility for more New Yorkers continues to move forward. We need as many New Yorkers to be vaccinated as quickly as possible and the City is looking at these new allowances. ....
10:30 a.m.: State funds to distribute and administer the COVID-19 vaccine were hindered by top Trump administration officials who pressed Congress to deny local government aid ahead of the vaccine rollout, according to a report in STAT News. Regional leaders had for months railed against the Trump administration for failing to provide adequate COVID-19 relief to cities and states, which were hamstrung in New York by a massive budget deficit. In October, the National Governors Association, chaired by Governor Andrew Cuomo, warned the feds that states would be “hampered” from adequately running vaccine programs without more money. But instead, STAT News reports that the former deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, Paul Mango, argued states hadn’t spent $200 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by October the month after the aid was announced and two months before vaccine distribution even began. Mango al ....
1:20 p.m.: Public health officials in South Carolina announced Thursday that two coronaviruses cases are associated with the South African variant. These are the first two cases of this variant, which is named B.1.351, in the United States. Epidemiologists in South Africa announced the emergence of this variant in mid-December. Unlike the U.K strain, which is simply better at spreading, researchers say B.1.351’s advantage stems from bypassing our immunity. According to the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, there is no known travel history or connection between these two cases which suggests there’s already community transmission. On Wednesday, White House officials said the nation ranks 43rd in genomic sequencing the special brand of testing needed to identify these variants and track how quickly they spread. ....
10:47 a.m.: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has placed all hand sanitizers from Mexico on an import alert after the regulator found 84% of hand sanitizer samples analyzed between April and December last year were out of compliance. The FDA analysis also discovered more than half of the imported sanitizers contained methanol or 1-propanol. Methanol is toxic when absorbed through the skin and life-threatening if ingested, while 1-propanol is considered a neurotoxin. The import alert does not ban the products, but instead places hand sanitizers from the country under “heightened FDA scrutiny.” Inspectors must now evaluate whether the importers have evidence the products were made in accordance with U.S. rules. The FDA says it is the first “countrywide import alert for any category of drug product.” ....
5 p.m.: Schools can and should reopen for safe in-person learning with appropriate COVID-19 precautions if other risky community behavior can be minimized, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control said Tuesday in a new study that examined fall semester data from schools across the country. “With masking requirements and student cohorting, transmission risk within schools appeared low, suggesting that schools might be able to safely open with appropriate mitigation efforts in place,” the Journal of the American Medical Association study said. “The conclusion here is with proper prevention efforts … we can keep transmission in schools and educational settings quite low,” the lead author of the JAMA report, Margaret Honein, told the Washington Post. “We didn’t know that at the beginning of the year but the data has really accumulated.” ....