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Politics

How Afghanistan fell to the Taliban so rapidly

How Afghanistan fell to the Taliban so quickly

Taliban members are seen near Hamid Karzai International Airport as thousands of Afghans rush to flee the Afghan capital of Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 16, 2021.

Haroon Sabawoon | Getty Images

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The world was shocked this week by horrifying scenes of desperate Afghans swarming the tarmac at Kabul’s international airport, grasping at their last chance to escape a country now completely overrun by the Taliban.

After nearly two decades of war, more than 6,000 American lives lost, over 100,000 Afghans killed and more than $2 trillion spent by the U.S., the outlook for the country’s future was still grim, with regional experts assuming the Taliban would ultimately come to control most of Afghanistan once again.

But few expected a takeover this swift, with so little resistance from the Afghan government and Afghan National Army, the latter of which was funded and trained with $89 billion from the U.S. taxpayer.

“While the end result and bloodletting once we left was never in doubt, the speed of collapse is unreal,” one former intelligence official and U.S. Marine who served in Afghanistan told CNBC, requesting anonymity due to professional restrictions.

“Why were the Taliban able to so quickly take over? This is a masterpiece, frankly, operationally,” Michael Zacchea, a retired U.S. Marine who led an American-trained Iraqi Army battalion during the Iraq War, told CNBC. “Why were they able to take the country faster than we did in 2001?”

The question has been asked by Americans, Afghans, military veterans and international observers alike — and the answer, much like the Afghanistan conflict itself, is complex, multilayered and tragic.

But among the main causes, analysts say, are intelligence failures, a more powerful Taliban, corruption, money, cultural differences, and simple willpower.

Intelligence failure

The Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan, including its capital and the presidential palace, suggests that U.S. military intelligence failed in its assessment of the situation, according to Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“This is an intelligence failure of the highest order,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday, adding that it’s the “biggest intelligence failure” since the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, a campaign of devastating surprise attacks on the U.S. and its allies in 1968.

Roggio said the Taliban pre-positioned equipment and materials, organized, planned and executed a “massive offensive” since early May before beginning its “final assault,” while U.S. officials said the local government and military forces should be able to hold out for six months to a year.

Last week, Reuters reported that a U.S. defense official saw Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, falling in 90 days. Instead, that happened on Sunday, less than 10 days after the first provincial capital of Zaranj was taken by the Taliban.

‘A collapse in the will to fight’

What’s key to note is that the Taliban did not have to fight their way into Afghanistan’s provincial capitals but rather brokered a series of surrenders, says Jack Watling, a research fellow for land warfare and military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in London. Over the last few years of fighting, the group managed to gain control of some 50% of the country by seizing rural areas.

We did not understand the tribal dynamics, we never did. We think everybody wants what we have. It’s cultural obtuseness, obliviousness to their reality.

Michael Zacchea

U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. (ret)

And when they began making headway in cities, many Afghan forces gave in to them, convinced that the government in Kabul would not back them up.

“The Taliban would infiltrate urban areas, assassinating key people like pilots, threatening the families of commanders, saying if you capitulate, you’ll save your family,” Watling said.

“A lot of people, because they lacked confidence that Kabul would be able to save them, capitulated.” More and more people chose this route, “so there was very little fighting, which is why it suddenly happened so fast,” he added. 

“The speed is not a reflection of military capability, it is a reflection of a collapse in will to fight.”

An Afghan National Army soldier stands guard at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan April 21, 2021.

Mohammad Ismail | Reuters

The news from the Biden administration of the full U.S. withdrawal sped this up, said Stephen Biddle, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University.

“When the U.S. announced a total withdrawal, that sent a signal to Afghan soldiers and police that the end was near, and converted chronically poor motivation into acute collapse as nobody wanted to be the last man standing after the others gave up,” he explained.

“Once the signal was sent, contagion dynamics thus took over and the collapse snowballed with increasing speed and virtually no actual fighting,” Biddle added.

Women with their children try to get inside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan August 16, 2021.

Stringer | Reuters

In April, Biden ordered the Pentagon to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, a decision he said was made in lockstep with NATO coalition forces. On Monday, the president defended his decision to leave the country and placed the blame squarely on the Afghan national government.

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” Biden said. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them with the will to fight for that future,” he added.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani himself fled the country on Sunday evening as the Taliban entered the presidential palace and declared the war “over.” Ghani said he fled to prevent “a flood of bloodshed.”

“The Taliban have won with the judgment of their swords and guns, and are now responsible for the honor, property and self-preservation of their countrymen,” Ghani said.

Despite being vastly outnumbered by the Afghan military, which has long been assisted by U.S. and NATO coalition forces, the Taliban carried out a succession of shocking battlefield gains in recent weeks.

On Sunday, the Taliban arrived at their last destination and seized the presidential palace in Kabul.

“The swift Taliban takeover shows how utterly dependent the Afghan state was on the U.S.-led coalition, materially and psychologically. Even before the U.S. withdrawal, the Afghan government and security forces were fraying at the seams,” said John Ciorciari, director of the International Policy and Weiser Diplomacy Center at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Policy.

“Soon after the U.S. pullout began, Afghan troops and officials began jumping ship, either to appease the Taliban or to retreat into old ethnic militias. The Taliban takeover will not bring peace. As the dust settles, many U.S.-trained fighters will likely regroup along ethnic lines to fight again,” he added.

Taliban ‘much more adept’ militarily

Not everyone believes the U.S. troop withdrawal is to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan today.

Kirsten Fontenrose, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said the Taliban has become more effective since the 1990s.

“They’ve become much more adept … militarily and non-militarily in terms of pursuing the same objective they have — which is establishing an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan,” she told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.

“The U.S. withdrawal is not the reason the Afghan government was outmaneuvered,” she added.

Fontenrose said the Taliban surrounded the capital of Kabul, cut off supply lines that government forces needed, and have also have grown in numbers while developing new strategies.

“They use social media as lethally as they do sniper rifles. They’ve used coercion to pressure local tribal leaders, they’ve used pretty simple but effective text message campaigns to threaten local Afghans working with the U.S. and with other foreign efforts,” she described.

The Taliban also lets ground commanders make decisions, and brings people into captured territories to provide small-scale social services to the residents.

That has allowed the group to “outmaneuver” Afghan and foreign forces in terms of effectively appealing, co-opting or coercing the local population into supporting — or not opposing — them, she added.

Afghan government corruption and military weakness

Had the Taliban engaged in a full military onslaught and faced resistance, the blitz of the country would have taken longer — but it still would have happened, Watling believes.

“I think the Taliban would have still won,” he said. “And this is because the Afghan National Army is comprised of lots of units that are systemically corrupt, have no effective command and control, they don’t know how many people are in their own units, most of their equipment has been taken apart, stolen and sold off, and so they were a completely dysfunctional force.”

Soldiers in many cases have not been fed very well, very rarely been paid and been on duty for a long time away from home… and were not well-led.

Jack Watling

Research Fellow for Land Warfare, RUSI

It’s also because the Afghan military is woefully underpaid, underfed and undercompensated by the leadership in Kabul.

The “soldiers in many cases have not been fed very well, very rarely been paid and been on duty for a long time away from home … and were not well led,” Watling added, a tactical failure that resulted in heavy casualties to the tune of about 40 soldiers a day for the past several years.

Many army units would sell their equipment to the Taliban for cash, and there were frequent desertions that went unaccounted for, leaving inflated troop numbers on the books.

How little Americans ‘understand Afghanistan’

Central to understanding America’s failure in Afghanistan also comes down to understanding the country’s history and its culture — and how drastically it differs from any Western nation.

“There’s never been a central government in Afghanistan. To think we could establish one was a fool’s errand,” said the former U.S. intelligence officer and Afghan War veteran. “The ‘surprise’ at the Taliban regaining power shows just how little Americans, from top to bottom, understand Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan is a country of numerous tribes, languages, ethnicities and religious sects, and Washington and its NATO allies were attempting to turn it into a unified democracy premised on largely Western values.

“There was a fundamental failure to understand what the Afghans wanted,” Zacchea, who trained an Iraqi battalion in 2004, said. “We assumed they wanted what we had — liberal democracy, Judeo-Christian values … And think they’d just automatically convert. And that is not the case.”

Tribal alliances in Afghanistan very often supersede national ones, or loyalties follow money and power. And part of the Taliban’s strength lay in the fact that as Pashtuns, they belonged to the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

“Meanwhile,” the former U.S. intelligence official said, “we basically supported a hodgepodge of ethnic minorities, who never had the capability of unifying the country.”

A U.S. soldier keeps watch at an Afghan National Army (ANA) base in Logar province, Afghanistan August 5, 2018

Omar Sobhani | Reuters

“We did not understand the tribal dynamics, we never did,” Zacchea said. “We think everybody wants what we have. It’s cultural obtuseness, obliviousness to their reality and their lived experience.” 

The nature of the U.S.-brokered cease-fire with the Taliban in early 2020 also further weakened the Afghan government’s image: Negotiations led by the Trump administration left out the elected leadership in Kabul, which “destroyed the Afghan government’s legitimacy” at a time when it already had little respect from local communities, said Watling.

Afghans across the country of 39 million have expressed acute fear for their country’s future — especially women, who following the U.S. invasion in 2001 were able to go to school for the first time since the Taliban first took control of Afghanistan in 1996. For many Afghan War veterans, bringing some of these basic freedoms to Afghans made their sacrifices worth it.

Now, those achievements are set to vanish, lamented one American veteran who served as an infantryman in the country in 2011.

“I have no regrets about what I did in Afghanistan,” the former Marine told CNBC, requesting his name be withheld due to job restrictions on speaking to the press.

“I just feel devastated for the people I saw over my time there when they were kids. Now they’re teens, and I can only imagine what they are going through.”

— Amanda Macias contributed to this report from Washington, Natasha Turak contributed from Dubai, and Abigail Ng contributed from Singapore.

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World News

The Afghan Navy Was Constructed Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Shortly?

The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly?

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – The surrenders appear to be as quick as the Taliban can travel.

Under the pressure of an advance by the Taliban that began in May, the Afghan security forces have collapsed in more than 15 cities in the past few days. Officials on Friday confirmed it included two of the country’s main provincial capitals: Kandahar and Herat.

The swift offensive has resulted in mass surrenders, captured helicopters, and millions of dollars in American equipment displayed on grainy cellphone videos by the Taliban. Fierce fighting had been going on for weeks in the outskirts of some cities, but the Taliban eventually overtook their lines of defense and then invaded with little or no resistance.

This implosion comes despite the fact that the United States has poured more than $ 83 billion in weapons, equipment, and training into the country’s security forces over two decades.

Building the Afghan security apparatus was one of the key elements of the Obama administration’s strategy, which nearly a decade ago sought a way to surrender security and leave. Out of these efforts, an army modeled on the US military emerged, an Afghan institution that was to outlast the American war.

But it will likely be gone before the United States is.

As Afghanistan’s future seems increasingly uncertain, one thing is becoming abundantly clear: the United States’s 20-year effort to rebuild Afghanistan’s military into a robust and independent force has failed, and that failure is now happening in real time as the country is under control the Taliban gets caught.

How the Afghan military fell apart for the first time was evident not last week but months ago in an accumulation of casualties that began before President Biden announced that the United States would withdraw by September 11th.

It began with individual outposts in rural areas, in which starving and ammunition-poor soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised a safe passage if they surrender and leave their equipment behind, and the insurgents slowly gaining control over roads and then whole Districts existed. When the positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: there was no air support, or supplies and groceries had run out.

But even before that, the systemic weaknesses of the Afghan security forces were evident, which on paper numbered around 300,000 people, but in the last few days, according to US officials, only amounted to a sixth of them. These shortcomings can be attributed to numerous problems arising from the West’s insistence on building a fully modern military, with all the necessary logistics and supply complexities, which have proven unsustainable without the United States and its NATO allies.

Soldiers and police officers have expressed deeper and deeper grudges against the Afghan leadership. Officials have often turned a blind eye knowing that the real number of Afghan forces was much lower than what the books said, skewed by the corruption and secrecy they tacitly accepted.

And when the Taliban gained momentum after the US withdrawal announcement, it only reinforced belief that it was not worth dying for the fighting within the security forces – for President Ashraf Ghani’s administration. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of desperation and abandonment.

On a front line in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar last week, the Afghan security forces’ apparent inability to repel the Taliban’s devastating offensive was due to potatoes.

After weeks of fighting, a carton full of slimy potatoes should pass as a police unit’s daily ration. They had had nothing but tubers of various shapes for several days, and their hunger and tiredness wore them down.

“Those fries won’t hold those front lines!” Yelled one policeman, disgusted by the lack of support they received in the second largest city in the country.

That front line collapsed on Thursday and Kandahar was under Taliban control by Friday morning.

In recent weeks, Afghan troops have been consolidated to defend Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals as the Taliban focused on urban attacks from attacks on rural areas. But this strategy proved in vain when the insurgent fighters overran one city after another, captured around half of the provincial capitals of Afghanistan and encircled Kabul within a week.

“They are just trying to get us ready,” said Abdulhai, 45, a police chief who held the Kandahar Northern Front last week.

The Afghan security forces have suffered well over 60,000 deaths since 2001. But Abdulhai was not talking about the Taliban, but about his own government, which he felt was so incapable that it had to be part of a larger plan to cede territory to the Taliban.

The months of defeats seemed to peak on Wednesday when the entire headquarters of an Afghan army corps – the 217th – at Kunduz airport in the north of the city fell to the Taliban. The insurgents captured a disused attack helicopter. Images of a US-supplied drone seized by the Taliban were circulating on the Internet along with images of rows of armored vehicles.

Brig. General Abbas Tawakoli, commander of the 217th Afghan Army Corps, who was in a nearby province when his base fell, echoed Abdulhai’s sentiments as reasons for his troops’ defeat on the battlefield.

“Unfortunately, a number of MPs and politicians knowingly and unknowingly kindled the flame kindled by the enemy,” General Tawakoli said just hours after the Taliban released videos of their fighters raiding the general’s sprawling base.

“No region fell from the war, but from the psychological war,” he said.

This psychological war has taken place on different levels.

Afghan pilots say their leadership cares more about the condition of planes than about the people who fly them: men and at least one woman burned out from countless evacuation missions – often under fire – while the Taliban wages a brutal assassination campaign against them .

The remnants of the elite commandos, used to holding territory still under government control, are transported from one province to another with no clear destination and very little sleep.

The ethnically oriented militias, known as forces to reinforce the lines of government, have also been almost all overrun.

The second city to fall this week was Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan, a capital defended by a formidable force commanded by Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum, a notorious warlord and former Afghan vice president who has survived for the past 40 years should of the war by cutting deals and changing sides.

Another prominent Afghan warlord and former governor, Mohammad Ismail Khan, surrendered on Friday.

“We are drowning in corruption,” said Abdul Haleem, 38, a police officer on the Kandahar frontline earlier this month. His special unit was half-strength – 15 out of 30 – and several of his comrades who stayed at the front were there because their villages had been captured.

“How are we supposed to defeat the Taliban with so much ammunition?” He said. The heavy machine gun, for which his unit had very few bullets, broke later that night.

On Thursday it was unclear whether Mr. Haleem was still alive and what was left of his comrades.

As the Taliban ransack the country almost continuously, their strength is in question. Official estimates have long been between 50,000 and 100,000 fighters. Now that number is even darker as the international armed forces and intelligence capabilities retreat.

Some US officials say Taliban numbers have risen due to the influx of foreign fighters and an aggressive conscription campaign in captured areas. Other experts say the Taliban got much of their strength from Pakistan.

Yet even in the midst of a possible total surrender by the Afghan government and its armed forces, troops are still fighting.

As in any conflict since the dawn of time, soldiers and police officers mostly fight for each other and for the subordinate leaders who inspire them to fight in spite of the hell that lies ahead.

When the Taliban invaded the outskirts of the southern city of Lashkar Gah in May, a hodgepodge of border guards held the line. The police officers who were supposed to defend the area had long since surrendered, withdrawn or been paid by the Taliban, as happened in many parts of the country over the past year.

Armed with rifles and machine guns, some in uniform, some not, the border guards beamed when their stubborn captain Ezzatullah Tofan arrived at their grenade-shattered position, a house abandoned during the fighting.

He always comes to the rescue, said one soldier.

When the Taliban were advancing into Lashkar Gah, provincial capital of Helmand Province, late last month, an outpost called their headquarters elsewhere in the city and asked for reinforcements. In an audio recording obtained from the New York Times, the commander in chief on the other end told them to stay and fight.

Captain Tofan bring reinforcements, he said, and should hold out a little longer. That was about two weeks ago.

On Friday, despite weary resistance from the Afghan military, repeated reinforcement flights and even American B-52 bombers, the city was in the hands of the Taliban.

Taimoor Shah and Jim Huylebroek contributed to coverage from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Najim Rahim and Fatima Faizi contributed from Kabul. Eric Schmitt contributed to the reporting.

Categories
Politics

Why Kristi Noem Is Rising Rapidly as a Republican Prospect for 2024

Why Kristi Noem Is Rising Quickly as a Republican Prospect for 2024

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of marketing to South Dakota.

At the confluence of the Midwest and West and bifurcated by the Missouri River, the state has relied on tourism since the beginning of the 20th century when another ambitious governor, Peter Norbeck, tirelessly promoted the development of a granite monument in the Black Hills that could accommodate visitors lure to the region.

Ms. Noem has shown a similar passion for making the state a travel destination, mostly mixing tourism with politics, arranging for fireworks to be displayed at Mount Rushmore to lure Mr. Trump there last year. South Dakota similarly trumpets pheasant hunting, zander fishing, and even more blatant tourist pit stops like Wall Drug and the Mitchell Corn Palace.

“We don’t have a lot of industry in South Dakota, and we don’t have a lot of natural resources that are pumped up or extracted from the ground. So if you have a state that is basically acting and ranching, you need this. State dollars, ”said Ted Hustead, whose family owns Wall Drug, whose western collection of shops and restaurants is a major tourist attraction.

That need has put Ms. Noem in a vise over transgender legislation.

She initially said she would support the bill. But she reversed course after facing backlash from the influential South Dakota business community who feared the National Collegiate Athletic Association would pull money-making basketball tournaments out of the state.

Ms. Noem was pressured by Tucker Carlson to change her mind in a rare, controversial interview with Fox News, and the flap raised suspicion among social conservatives.

“She says whatever she thinks she says,” said Taffy Howard, a state lawmaker who has asked Ms. Noem to disclose the details of the state money she used on safety on her frequent trips. “This was about keeping their donors happy.”

The House overturned Ms. Noem’s partial veto of the trans law, but the Senate declined to take action, doomed the legislation to failure.

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Health

CDC Covid steering should adapt to new science extra shortly

CDC Covid guidance must adapt to new science more quickly

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must adjust their Covid recommendations faster as new scientific knowledge emerges, said Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Monday, adding that the agency needs to do the same with more transparency.

“These guidelines have more of an economic impact than regulation,” but Gottlieb said in Squawk Box that they are much less publicly scrutinized.

The former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration’s comments came after the CDC changed its guidelines on social distancing in schools, not society at large, on Friday. The Public Health Agency said that with universal masking, most students can sit 3 feet apart instead of the previous 6 foot protocol. The CDC also continued to recommend a separation of at least 6 feet between adults in schools and between adults and students.

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Gottlieb urged the CDC to be more open about the science behind their guidelines, writing that the “exact basis for their initial view of staying 6 feet apart” remains unclear . In the Journal and on CNBC, he said initial recommendations and precautions early last year were based on the novel coronavirus, which spread like seasonal influenza.

“It was sensible to do this because we didn’t know much about the coronavirus and therefore assumed that it would behave like the flu. It didn’t behave like the flu,” said Gottlieb in “Squawk Box” and claimed it crucially led health officials to “both overestimate and underestimate this virus”.

“It’s not so much an important question: ‘Were we wrong?’ We were wrong in some ways, “added Gottlieb, who headed the FDA in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019. “But: ‘Have we learned quickly enough and adjusted our recommendations and guidelines quickly enough?’ The answer is no. “

In a statement to CNBC, a CDC spokesman said that “during the first year of the pandemic, there were concerns about some of the CDC’s guidelines.” However, the spokesman said the agency’s new director under President Joe Biden, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has “pledged to restore scientific credibility and public confidence in the agency” the latest science.

We underestimated the role of air quality and quality masks because we underestimated that aerosol transmission spreads this.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb

Former FDA commissioner

Gottlieb said on CNBC that health officials “have overestimated the benefits of physical distancing because the flu spreads primarily through droplet transmission, and we know droplets don’t spread more than six feet.” On the other hand, he added, “We underestimated the role of air quality and quality masks because we underestimated the fact that aerosol transmission spreads it.”

Initially, doctors had expressed some skepticism about whether advising Americans to wear face covering – especially something homemade like a scarf or headscarf – would be effective. However, in early April last year, the CDC began recommending that people wear them in public, especially in environments like grocery stores where social distancing was more difficult to maintain.

There is little debate in the public health community these days about the importance of wearing face masks, and some experts like White House Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anthony Fauci, even started to suggest that wearing two masks is probably more effective.

As early as October, the CDC recognized the spread of the coronavirus through particles in the air that “linger in the air for minutes to hours” and infect people who were more than a meter apart.

On the CDC website, titled “How COVID-19 Spreads,” the health department says it “most often” happens through close contact between people within 6 feet.

“There is evidence that, under certain conditions, people with COVID-19 appear to have infected others more than three feet away,” adds the CDC. “These transmissions took place in closed rooms with insufficient ventilation. Sometimes the infected person breathed heavily, for example when singing or exercising.”

Some of the areas where Covid risks were initially overestimated also included contaminated surfaces, Gottlieb told CNBC. The CDC updated its website in May 2020 – about two months after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic – to emphasize that the virus did not spread easily from a person touching a contaminated surface, according to NBC News.

Gottlieb acknowledged that in the early stages of a health crisis like the Covid pandemic, there may be a lack of quality information to use as a basis for guidelines.

“When the CDC makes recommendations, there are different levels of evidence and different levels of security behind those recommendations,” he said. “If the agency is unsure or suggests a recommendation for a less specific science, they should be really transparent about it so that we can take seriously an interpretation we want to take, but they usually don’t.”

The CDC spokesman told CNBC that “key findings” have already been implemented following the agency’s latest review, including “reviewing key guidelines for possible updates at least every three months” and “improving clarity and usability”.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC employee and board member of Pfizer, the genetic testing startup Tempus, healthcare technology company Aetion, and Illumina biotech. He is also co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean’s Healthy Sail Panel.

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Health

Covid instances are rising in 21 states as well being officers warn in opposition to reopening too rapidly

Dentists, veterinarians and med students authorized to administer shots in U.S.

A U.S. Army soldier with the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division immunizes Jacklina Mendez with the COVID-19 vaccine on March 9, 2021 on the north campus of Miami Dade College in North Miami, Florida.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Even if the pace of vaccination accelerates in the US, cases of Covid-19 are increasing in 21 states and highly infectious variants spread as governors relax restrictions on businesses like restaurants, bars and gyms.

Public health officials warn that while about 2.5 million people receive shots daily across the country, infection rates have risen this month and some states have not reduced the number of daily cases.

According to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, the 7-day moving average of new infections on Friday was 54,666 after falling for weeks.

More than 541,000 people in the United States have died from the disease.

The Chief Medical Officer of the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned during a briefing on Friday that the country should not declare victory until the infection level is “much, much lower”. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky has also urged states not to reopen too quickly and undermine the country’s progress against the pandemic.

Knyckolas Davis (L) and Matthew Bettencourt celebrate Davis ’35. Birthday with friends at Rizzo’s Bar & Inn in Wrigleyville as coronavirus disease (COVID-19) restrictions ease on March 6, 2021 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Eileen T. Meslar | Reuters

“The concern is that there are a number of states, cities, and regions across the country that are withdrawing some of the mitigation methods we talked about: withdrawing mask mandates, withdrawing to essentially non-mandate measures in the area of public health are implemented, “said Fauci at the briefing.

“So it’s unfortunate but not surprising to me that the number of cases per day is increasing in areas – cities, states or regions – even though vaccines are being distributed at a pretty good amount of 2 to 3 million per day,” Fauci added added. “That could be overcome if certain areas prematurely withdraw the containment and public health measures we are all talking about.”

Infections are increasing in the following states: Alabama; Connecticut; Hawaii; Idaho; Illinois; Maine; Maryland; Massachusetts; Michigan; Minnesota; Missouri; Montana; New Hampshire; New Jersey; New York; North Dakota; Pennsylvania; Rhode Island; Virginia; Washington; and West Virginia.

The highly contagious variant, first identified in the UK, is likely to account for up to 30% of Covid infections among US health officials. The variant could become dominant by the end of this month or early April.

The variant is seen as the cause of the third coronavirus wave in Europe. Several countries, including France and Italy, have put in place new lockdown measures to reduce the spread of viruses when cases increase.

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Health

U.S. to vary allocation to favor states that shortly administer photographs

U.S. to change allocation to favor states that quickly administer shots

The federal government is changing the way coronavirus vaccine doses are allocated, now based on how quickly states can administer shots and how large their elderly population is, Minister of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Tuesday.

States have two weeks to prepare for the change, Azar told reporters during a news conference. This should give states enough time to report their data to the government and ensure that all vaccinations are documented “promptly,” he said.

States are currently not reporting vaccinations in a timely manner, Azar said, adding that vaccine doses “sit in hospital freezers”.

The announcement comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues new guidelines that extend eligibility for coronavirus vaccines to anyone over 65, as well as those with comorbid conditions like diabetes and heart disease. States’ focus on vaccinating health workers and nursing homes has created a bottleneck that is slowing the pace of vaccination, a senior administrative official told CNBC.

“The states should not wait to complete the prioritization of phase 1a before moving on to broader categories of eligibility,” said Azar on Tuesday the new guidelines. “Think of it like getting on a plane. You may have a sequential order in which you board people. But you don’t wait for literally every person in a group to board before moving on to the next . ”

The Trump administration will also stop withholding millions of doses reserved for the second round of vaccinations with Pfizer’s and Moderna’s two-dose vaccines, the official said, adding it released doses that were held in reserve Sunday . President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team announced a similar plan on Friday.

Approximately 53 million Americans 65 and older and 110 million people 16 to 64 years old with comorbid conditions can now get the vaccine if each state adopts the CDC guidelines.

The vaccine doses were previously assigned based on the number of adults in each state. But US officials complain that the pace of vaccinations has been too slow as the supply of vaccine doses exceeds demand.

Arkansas and Georgia are the two worst performers, vaccinating 1,355 and 1,346 people per 100,000, respectively, according to CDC data. The Dakotas and West Virginia now fire more than 5,000 shots per 100,000 people, according to the agency.

As of Monday morning, more than 25.4 million doses had been distributed in the US, but just over 8.9 million shots had been administered according to CDC data. The number is a far cry from the federal government’s goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans by the end of 2020 and 50 million Americans by the end of this month.

State and local health officials have said they are strapped for cash. They blame insufficient funding and inconsistent communication from the federal government for the slow roll-out.

To speed up the pace of vaccinations, Dr. Stephen Hahn, Commissioner for the Azar and Food and Drug Administration, told states last week to begin vaccinating lower priority groups against Covid-19.

The CDC recommended immunizing health care workers and nursing homes first, but states are free to distribute the vaccine at their discretion. Hahn told reporters that states should give shots to groups that “make sense” such as the elderly, people with pre-existing conditions, police, fire departments and other key workers.

Azar admitted on Tuesday that the government’s guidelines are new, adding that vendors typically have a month to report their data instead of days. “This is a big change in the workflow for them. There will be kinks in the system for them in relation to this data,” he said.

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Business

The U.Okay. has recognized a brand new Covid-19 pressure that spreads extra shortly. This is what they know

The U.K. has identified a new Covid-19 strain that spreads more quickly. Here's what they know

England’s top medical officer announced Saturday that the UK had identified a new variant of the coronavirus that “can spread faster” than previous strains of the virus, prompting Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose new restrictions on parts of the nation to control its spread.

“We learn from this over time, but we already know enough, more than enough, to be sure that we need to act now,” Johnson said during a press conference on Saturday setting new restrictions on London and other parts of England before the Christmas holidays.

“If the virus changes its method of attack, we’ll have to change our method of defense,” said Johnson.

The UK government announced the new strain of coronavirus on Monday after cases increased in the south and east of England. According to a statement from Public Health England, just over 1,100 Covid-19 cases had been identified with the new variant by Sunday.

Now it is believed the new strain could be up to 70% more communicable than the original strain of the disease, Johnson said on Saturday, adding that it appears to be fueling the rapid spread of infections. Johnson urged residents not to travel and “stay on-site” to keep the new strain from moving around the country and abroad.

The UK reports around 24,061 new Covid-19 cases daily based on a weekly average, an increase of more than 40% from the previous week, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

“This is early data that needs to be verified, but it is the best we have right now and we need to respond to information as we have it because it is now spreading very quickly,” said Johnson.

Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said at the press conference that “viruses are constantly mutating”. Seasonal influenza mutates every year, and other new variants of the coronavirus have already been identified in countries like Spain, according to Public Health England.

What needs to be answered is whether the new strain will transmit more easily, make people sick, and whether it will change the way a person’s immune system responds to the virus if they are already infected or vaccinated, Whitty said.

So far, a body of evidence from genetic studies, frequency studies, and laboratory studies suggests that the new strain “has a significant, substantial increase in transmissibility,” Whitty said. So far, however, there is no evidence that the new strain causes a higher mortality rate.

Health officials believe the new variant first appeared in London or Kent in mid-September, and by mid-November it is believed to have caused about 28% of cases in London and other parts of south-east England, Whitty said.

Now those numbers are much higher, he said. In London last week, data suggests the new variant accounts for more than 60% of new cases, Whitty said.

“So that tells us that this new variant is not only moving fast, it also transmits better, it also becomes the dominant variant. It beats everyone else in terms of transmission,” he said.

However, there is “no evidence” that it causes more severe illness, more hospitalizations, or “more problems than the other virus,” Whitty said. While there are reasons to suspect the new variant might alter a person’s immune response to the disease, nothing suggests that it has so far, he said.

“We are currently assuming by all scientists that the vaccine response for this virus should be appropriate,” he said. “Obviously this has to be checked in the future, and we have to remain vigilant in this regard.”

The UK has alerted the World Health Organization and will continue to analyze data on the new strain.

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If academics get vaccinated rapidly, can college students return to highschool?

If teachers get vaccinated quickly, can students go back to school?

In Arizona, where several schools have gone online in the past few weeks due to a flood of viruses, Governor Doug Ducey said teachers would be among the first to be vaccinated. “Teachers are essential to our state,” he said. Utah Governor Gary Herbert spoke about the possibility of educators being shot this month. And Los Angeles officials urged teachers to be given priority over firefighters and prison guards.

But in areas where kids spent much of the fall staring at laptop screens, it can be too early for parents to hope that public schools will open their doors soon or that students will return before the next time all day in the classroom are falling.

Given the limited number of vaccines available to the states and the logistical hurdles to distribute them, including the fact that two doses are needed several weeks apart, experts said that vaccination of the three million school teachers in the United States would States could be a slow process that lasts well into the US spring.

And even if enough educators are vaccinated for school officials and teacher unions, who have considerable power in many large districts, to hold classroom reopenings safe, schools will most likely need masks and detached students for many months to come, experts say the community’s expansion has decreased significantly, possibly by summer.

“I think some people have in mind that when we get the vaccine we will start and all of these other things will go away,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. represents public health authorities.

But in schools as in everyday life there will be no quick fix. “I have a feeling we will all be wearing masks and keeping our distance and trying to be careful with each other for probably most of 2021.”

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Health

Not all seniors will get Covid vaccine rapidly. Most should wait

Not all seniors will get Covid vaccine quickly. Most will have to wait

Ergin Yalcin | E + | Getty Images

For the nation’s oldest seeking protection from Covid, the waiting game has begun.

Shipments of 2.9 million doses of the first U.S.-approved coronavirus vaccine began on Sunday and resulted in hundreds of locations across the country. Because initial supply is limited – the total US population is around 330 million – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that priority be given to healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities during this first phase.

In other words, without the elderly in these facilities – including nursing homes and the like – the 65-year-old and the elderly may need to be patient.

“Seniors might start vaccinating in the first quarter, but it really will depend on how quickly the supply increases,” said Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in people aged 16 and over. One from Moderna could also get similar approval from the FDA in the coming days.

“If the Moderna vaccine gets approved this week, it will help because there will be more coverage,” Kates said.

According to a CDC advisory committee, demand is expected to outstrip supply in the first few months of the vaccination program. Although the vaccine will be phased out and administered to prioritize the most vulnerable populations, it is not certain how long it will take to cover each of these audiences.

According to a new Kaiser study, 19.7 million adults work in the healthcare sector, of which 15.5 million have direct patient contact. Around 2 million people live between nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

Introducing the Pfizer vaccine is a complex federal and state undertaking. Not only does the vaccine need to be stored at subzero temperatures and handled according to strict protocols, but it also requires two doses three weeks apart.

While Medicare – which insures a large proportion of the 65-year-olds and the elderly – recently changed its rules to fully cover a fast-moving vaccine, individual states are tasked with actually distributing the doses and identifying priority populations to be vaccinated. All states generally follow federal recommendations for their initial audiences, Kates said, adding that some have an expanded list of priorities.

What [the advisory committee] In reflection it has been said that they are very likely to recommend that key workers come next, then seniors and those with existing medical conditions.

Jennifer Kates

Senior Vice President at the Kaiser Family Foundation

It is uncertain which groups the CDC will recommend for prioritization after the first round of reporting or whether an earlier target of 20 million people vaccinated by the end of the year will be achieved. However, the Agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices last month suggested that the next priority population should be people 65 and over, critical workers, and those with underlying medical conditions who are at higher risk for Covid complications.

“What [the advisory committee] has said on reflection that they are very likely to recommend that key workers come next, and then seniors and those with existing medical conditions, “Kates said.

If these three populations focused on health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, an estimated 87 million vital workers, more than 53 million people aged 65 and over, and 100 million would be targeted with high-risk medical conditions, Kaiser finds in new research.

Availability also depends on how many doses each state is receiving, which is currently based on each state’s adult population. However, there aren’t the same proportions of audiences across all states – for example, some have more health care workers while others have more nursing home residents, Kates said.

“It’s possible that some of the initial assignments might not match,” Kates said.

According to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University, the pandemic has killed at least 299,191 people in the United States, with the number of cases over 16.25 million. These numbers account for around 19% of the 1.6 million Covid deaths worldwide and 23% of the 72.3 million cases worldwide.

CDC data shows that of approximately 262,000 Covid deaths as of December 9, more than 209,000 people were 65 years of age or older. Overall, residents of long-term care facilities have caused about 40% of deaths in the United States from Covid to date, according to the CDC.