The Health 202: Easter will feel better this year

So far, just 14 states have broadly opened eligibility for the coronavirus vaccine shots, a little more than three months into the immunization effort. They include: Alaska, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arizona, Utah, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Indiana and South Carolina.

Phil Galewitz, reporter for Kaiser Health News:

But nearly all the rest of the states are preparing to follow suit by May 1, the deadline set by President Biden for making every American over the age of 18 eligible to get immunized.

Jen Kates, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation:

The president has been prone to setting modest goals when it comes to the immunization effort. But now he’s promising that by April 19, 90 percent of adults in the United States will be eligible for the shots. Of course, being eligible doesn’t equate to being able to actually get a vaccine appointment, but it does indicate relative confidence by state officials that they’re at least in the realm of having enough supply to meet demand.

Biden made an additional promise: that by April 19, enough vaccination sites will be established that virtually all residents will live within five miles of one. He called the immunization campaign the “American turnout story” — although he also warned conditions could worsen if Americans discard all social distancing measures before enough people are fully vaccinated.

Biden speaking on Monday:

There have been plenty of frustrations and missteps along the way, as the federal government and state authorities have grappled with the largest mass vaccination effort in U.S. history. Most recently, Politico reported that the administration is rethinking its investment in mass vaccination sites after data showed the program is lagging despite enormous spending on it.

• More than 15 percent of U.S. adults have been fully vaccinated.
• At least 96 million people have received at least one vaccine dose 
• Over the past week, an average of 2.76 million doses were being administered every day — a rate nearing what even the most ambitious epidemiologists have recommended.

Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House coronavirus task force, noted a new milestone yesterday in vaccinating older Americans most vulnerable to serious illness or death from covid-19:

This morning, Pfizer announced its vaccine was safe and effective in adolescents as young as 12. Data from a trial of the vaccine in nearly 2,300 people between the ages of 12 and 15 will be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks, with the hope that vaccinations could begin to be used before the next school year, Erin Cunningham reports.

“The vaccine was 100 percent effective at preventing symptomatic illness within the trial and it triggered immune responses that were even more robust than those seen in young adults,” Erin writes.

“The data is the beginning of what many families, eager for normalcy to return, have been waiting to see,” she added. “The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is currently authorized by the FDA for emergency use for people 16 and older. If regulators extend the authorization to younger age groups, Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla said that vaccinations could begin before the next school year.”

A federal study released Monday found the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are robustly effective in preventing infections in real-life conditions, my colleague Lena H. Sun reported. It found that vaccines reduced the risk of infection by 80 percent after one shot and 90 percent after a second shot, in a study of about 4,000 health-care personnel, police, firefighters and other essential workers.

“The [Centers for Disease Control] report is significant, experts said, because it analyzed how well the vaccines worked among a diverse group of front-line working-age adults whose jobs make them more likely to be exposed to the virus and to spread it,” Lena H. Sun writes.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on MSNBC that the data “suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials, but it’s also in real-world data.”

Harvard Medical School professor Jeffrey Flier:

This was already the likelikhood, given how other vaccines work. Scientists hadn’t had enough time to observe how well the coronavirus vaccines worked, so officials had erred on the side of caution, warning people that they might still be able to spread the virus to others even after being fully vaccinated.

“The issue has received an increasing amount of attention from some of the party’s most extreme members and conservative media figures, but it has also been seized on by Republican leaders like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate,” The Post’s Annie Linskey, Dan Diamond and Tyler Pager report.

“We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said Monday. “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society.”

“Other Republicans have used more inflammatory rhetoric, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) calling the passport idea ‘Biden’s Mark of the Beast’ and some conservative activists comparing it with Nazi policies to identify Jews,” our colleagues write.

The rhetoric is directed at a nascent initiative between the Biden administration and private companies to develop a standard way for Americans to indicate that they have been vaccinated, which would potentially allow businesses to determine who can safely participate in activities such as flights, concerts and indoor dining. 

A tour of the Donna, Tex., temporary processing facility by the Associated Press and a camera crew on Tuesday was the first time that the administration allowed media to enter one of the crowded tents where minors have been held after crossing the border into the United States without their parents, The Post’s Nick Miroff reports. The facility is run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and houses minors before they are placed in shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.

“The reporters allowed inside described extreme levels of overcrowding, including one detention ‘pod’ with 516 minors despite a pandemic-rated capacity of 32 people. Another pod had 676 minors, and a third had 567, officials said. The Biden administration is on pace to take in more than 17,000 unaccompanied minors this month, far higher than the previous record of 11,861 in May 2019,” Nick writes.

CBP said that 14 percent of minors have been testing positive for the coronavirus when they are transferred to HHS shelters. The agency only tests the minors if they are showing symptoms. Earlier this month, HHS said that the positivity rate in its shelters is 4.5 percent, suggesting that more children may be acquiring infections in the CBP camps. 

The Post was not included in the small pool of media granted access to the facility but received a report. Officials said that the limited access granted to a small reporting crew was intended to minimize potential coronavirus exposure.

“Lenox Hill, one of the city’s oldest and best-known hospitals, repeatedly billed patients more than $3,000 for the routine nasal swab test, about 30 times the test’s typical cost,” the New York Times’s Sarah Kliff reports.

The New York Times reviewed 16 coronavirus test bills from the Manhattan hospital and found that the hospital bills six times the average fee for the test itself, in addition to billing the encounter as a “moderately complex” emergency room visit. 

“In one case, a family accrued $39,314 in charges for 12 tests this winter, all taken to fulfill requirements for returning to work or school. In another, an asymptomatic patient walked in because she saw the banner outside and wanted a test after traveling. Her insurance was charged $2,963,” Sarah writes.

Because Congress passed legislation requiring Congress to cover the full cost of coronavirus testing and any associated visits, individuals are usually protected, but Americans will eventually see the impact of the high prices in higher premiums.

Whitmer, a Democrat, appealed to White House officials to shift away from a strict allocation of vaccines based on population and instead rush doses to parts of the country experiencing surges in coronavirus cases, The Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker reports. The state has experienced one of the steepest increases nationwide in daily cases and hospitalizations, which some experts have linked to relaxed restrictions and a spread of new, more contagious variants of the virus.

“The inquiry reflects growing unease among state officials on the front lines of what health experts say could be a new wave of the virus already afflicting parts of Europe. And it illustrates the pressure President Biden is under, even from members of his own party, to show he is taking steps to address disquieting trends after a prolonged period of declining infections,” Isaac writes.

More from Whitmer this morning: 

Some public health officials have argued that the United States should do more to distribute vaccine doses to hot spots. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that there is enough incremental increase in vaccine supply to divert supplies to these areas without cutting existing allocations

But Jeff Zients, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, told Whitmer on a call with governors that the Biden administration is unlikely to change its formula for allocating vaccines.

• Thirteen countries joined the United States and the World Health Organization is expressing frustration with the level of access that China granted an international team of scientists investigating the origin of the coronavirus pandemic in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, The Post’s Emily Rauhala reports. The striking rebuke came as the team issued a report on its visit.
   
• The Biden administration is building a volunteer network of doctors, nurses, faith leaders and rural stakeholders to promote vaccines and combat skepticism, Politico’s Adam Cancryn reports.

Former president Trump pitched himself as an enemy of Big Pharma, citing his executive orders aimed at reducing high drug prices in the United States. But two weeks before leaving office, Trump’s administration gave a win to the prescription drug industry in the form of a rule that would block the government from citing high prices to seize control of a drug’s production.

“The rule, drawn up by a division of the Commerce Department, would settle a long-running battle over when government is justified in exercising ‘march in’ rights over taxpayer-supported government inventions. The 40-year-old Bayh-Dole law gives the government power to grant a license to another manufacturer if a company is not making a government-sponsored invention available to the public on ‘reasonable terms,’” The Post’s Christopher Rowland reports.

A comment period on the rule is open until April 5, after which the Commerce Department will have to decide whether to overturn it or make it final.

The government has never used the power, but many Democrats in Congress and health advocates say that it could be a potent tool for lowering prescription drug costs. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has forcefully supported march-in rights. While serving as California’s attorney general last year, he called on the government to seize production rights for Gilead’s remdesivir, a covid-19 treatment, citing limited production and high prices.

The request to Twitter, Facebook and Google follows a hearing by two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees in which tech executives discussed their content moderation practices and efforts to combat misinformation. Politicians from both parties expressed concern about the impact of social media on children, arguing that it contributes to increased rates of depression, anxiety and suicide.

Letters to the companies requesting the information were signed by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), the committee’s ranking Republican, along with Reps. Robert Latta (Ohio), Gus Bilirakis (Fla.) and Morgan Griffith (Va.) — all ranking Republicans on various subcommittees.