JACKSON, Miss. — Four days before Christmas, Chiquikta Fountain watched as a growing line of cars stretched down a mile of road in the Mississippi Delta.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Lily Guido was having trouble hearing and she felt warm while talking to her co-worker at a California nursing home. She knew something was wrong.
CAPE TOWN — A few months from now, a factory in South Africa is expected to begin churning out a million doses of Covid-19 vaccine each day in the African country hardest-hit by the pandemic.
But those vials will probably be shipped to a distribution center in Europe and then rushed to Western countries that have pre-ordered them by the hundreds of millions. None have been set aside for South Africa.
The country, which will help manufacture the vaccine and whose citizens have enrolled in clinical trials, does not expect to see the first trickle of doses until around the middle of next year. By then, the United States, Britain and Canada may already have vaccinated more than 100 million people.
PALM BEACH, Fla./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday signed into law a $2.3 trillion pandemic aid and spending package, officials said, restoring unemployment benefits to millions of Americans and averting a partial federal government shutdown.
Trump, who leaves office on Jan. 20 after losing November’s election, backed down from his threat to block the bill, which was approved Congress last week, after he came under intense pressure from lawmakers on both sides.
The Republican president, who golfed on Sunday and remained out of public view even as the potential government shutdown loomed, had demanded that Congress change the bill to increase the size of stimulus checks for struggling Americans to $2,000 from $600.
It was not immediately clear why Trump changed his mind as his resistance to the massive legislative package promised a chaotic final stretch of his presidency.
As countries in Europe rush to close their borders to the United Kingdom to prevent transmission of a new — and potentially more transmissible — variant of SARS-CoV-2, research has estimated the effect of international travel restrictions on COVID-19 spread earlier in the pandemic.
The Trump administration has made pharmacies a centerpiece of the country’s historic coronavirus vaccination campaign — a decision that could bypass low-income and minority populations hardest hit by the pandemic.
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