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President Joe Biden urges states to vaccinate lecturers, faculty workers this month

President Joe Biden urges states to vaccinate teachers, school staff this month

Letetsia A. Fox, Chapter President Los Angeles 500 of the California School Employees Association, receives her first COVID-19 Moderna shot from Nurse Sosse Bedrossian, Director of Nursing at LAUSD.

Al Seib | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images

President Joe Biden on Tuesday called on states to prioritize vaccinating teachers and school staff against Covid-19 with a goal of giving at least one shot to every educator and staff member across the country by the end of March.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously urged states to give priority to teacher vaccination. However, some public health professionals criticized that vaccination was not a requirement for K-12 schools to reopen.

“Let me be clear, we can reopen schools if the right steps are taken before staff are vaccinated,” Biden said at the White House on Tuesday. “But time and again we have heard from educators and parents who are concerned about it.”

To expedite the safe reopening of schools, Biden said, “Let’s treat personal learning as the essential service it is, and that means vaccinating key workers who provide that service, educators, school staff and child carers.” . ”

“My challenge for all states, territories and the District of Columbia is this: We want every educator, school worker and childcare worker to receive at least one shot by the end of March,” he added.

Biden said he will use the federal pharmacy partnership established with retail pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens to expand access to Covid-19 vaccines and make the shots available to teachers and school staff before K-12. This would enable these workers to obtain the vaccine in states where they do not meet local approval requirements.

His statement is the strongest appeal yet and the most ambitious timeline the federal government has tabled for states to give priority to educators and school staff, although that is not the mandate for it. Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, welcomed the president’s remarks as a concrete step in reopening schools for personal learning.

“What an enormous relief to have a president who can cope with this moment of crisis,” Weingarten said in a statement. “Vaccinations are an essential ingredient in safely reopening schools. This is the administration taking steps to expedite vaccination for educators. This is great news for anyone looking to study in school.”

With the doses of the Covid-19 vaccines still scarce, states are handing them out to prioritized groups, mostly key frontline workers, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. While the CDC makes recommendations as to which groups should receive the vaccine first, states ultimately make their own decisions.

The CDC has recommended that teachers be vaccinated in the Phase 1b group, which includes everyone over the age of 75, as well as “key people on the front lines”. However, some states have excluded teachers and school staff from their definition of the main frontline workforce.

Although the country’s top health authority recommends states give priority to vaccination teachers, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky explains that unvaccinated teachers shouldn’t be an obstacle to schools reopening. She said if schools follow public health precautions set by the CDC, teachers and staff can safely return to face-to-face learning.

However, based on the parameters set by the CDC, about 90% of schools in the country are in significant counties where the CDC says it is not safe for schools to fully reopen to face-to-face learning.

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CDC director ‘actually apprehensive’ about states rolling again Covid measures as instances seem to plateau

CDC director 'really worried' about states rolling back Covid measures as cases appear to plateau

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that she is “really concerned” that some states are pulling back public health measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic, as the US cases appear to be “very serious.” high “flatten.

The decline in Covid-19 cases since the beginning of January now appears to be stalling at around 70,000 new cases per day, said CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky during a press conference at the White House. “With these statistics, I’m really concerned that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from Covid-19.”

“Seventy thousand cases a day seem good compared to what we were a few months ago,” she said. “Please listen to me clearly: at this level of cases with expanding variation, we are completely losing the hard-earned ground we have gained.”

The U.S. has at least 67,300 new Covid-19 cases every day based on a 7-day average calculated by CNBC using data from Johns Hopkins University. The US hit a high of nearly 250,000 cases per day in early January after the winter break.

Senior U.S. health officials including Walensky and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisory of the White House, have warned over the past few weeks that the rise in more contagious variants could reverse the current downward trend in infections in the US and delay the nation’s recovery from the pandemic.

As of Sunday, the CDC had identified 2,400 cases of variant B.1.1.7, which were first identified in the UK. The agency identified 53 cases of the B.1.351 strain from South Africa and 10 cases of P.1, a variant for the first time in Brazil.

Fauci said Monday that U.S. health officials are also closely monitoring another variant in New York that contains mutations that help evade the body’s natural immune response.

Officials say viruses cannot mutate unless they infect hosts and cannot replicate. They are also urging Americans to get vaccinated as soon as possible before potentially new and even more dangerous variants continue to take hold.

Walensky said Monday that vaccinations will help the US get out of the pandemic, noting that the Food and Drug Administration has approved Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use. This makes it the third shot approved for distribution in the United States and the only vaccine that requires only one dose. Walensky canceled the vaccine on Sunday.

The J&J vaccine is a “much needed addition to our toolbox,” she said. By adding the permit, more people can be vaccinated.

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Virus Did Not Deliver Monetary Rout That Many States Feared

Virus Did Not Bring Financial Rout That Many States Feared

In his survey, Peter DeGroot, director of community research and strategy at JP Morgan, found a handful of states, including Idaho, South Dakota and New Mexico, that made even more money last year than they did in 2019. The survey also found several states where tax revenues have not yet declined because they depend heavily on tourism, oil and gas, or coal mining – including Hawaii, Nevada, Florida, Texas, and West Virginia.

Ms. Sheiner’s analysis found that Idaho had the largest revenue recovery of any state. She did research with Byron Lutz, a Federal Reserve economist.

Idaho financial management director Alex J. Adams said in an interview that the boom took officials by surprise and that they held a reason for the influx of new California residents to escape the high cost of this state’s life – a trend that started before the pandemic but accelerated over the past year. Mr Adams also said Idaho did not pause construction when the lockdowns were in place, which helped economic activity.

Idaho Republican Governor Brad Little said in his January speech to the state that 2020 revenue was strong enough to send $ 295 million back to taxpayers and still enough to move into better highways, Investing in bridges and broadband access. He also wrote to the Idaho Congressional delegation last year calling on them to oppose the use of non-binding federal dollars to rescue badly governed states.

With some states now “enjoying gusts of wind” and others still struggling, Mr. White said a smaller amount of money, more targeted towards the states that need it most, would be the most efficient approach for Congress. But getting help to those governments who really need it, without sending unnecessary aid to those who don’t, requires “exceptional creativity,” he said.

To some extent, the surprising rallies in states reflect the timing of events over the past year. The pandemic began when many state lawmakers were reviewing initial budget proposals for the coming fiscal year. The proposals worked out weeks before the shock forecast a year of heavy tax rises.

Then, within a few weeks, millions of people lost their jobs. State officials view unemployment as a major driver of their tax affairs; Research from previous recessions suggests that a single percentage point increase in the unemployment rate could cause the state budget to suffer $ 45 billion.

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New York well being chief defends state’s choice to make nursing houses take Covid sufferers

Cuomo administration underreported Covid deaths in nursing homes, report says

New York Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker on Friday defended the state’s decision in March to force nursing homes to admit hospital residents with the coronavirus, blaming staff for spreading the virus.

The guideline, enacted on March 25, banned nursing homes from refusing admission or readmission to residents infected with Covid-19. The policy also banned nursing homes from testing patients prior to entry, NBC News reported. The policy was reversed later in May.

Zucker said Friday that at the time, the coronavirus hospitalization rate in New York was increasing “at an astounding rate” and capacity in the state’s intensive care units was running low. By allowing residents to return to the nursing homes, it helped protect the health system from collapse, he said.

“You can only verify a decision based on the facts you had at the time,” Zucker said during a press conference next to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. “And with the facts we had at the time, it was the right decision from a public health perspective.”

Zucker said the decision was based on recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued at the time, that nursing homes should accept all residents who would normally accept them, including those diagnosed with Covid-19, for as long Precautions have been taken.

A CDC spokesman was not immediately available to comment on Zucker’s remarks.

“What if we hadn’t done it on March 25? Hospital beds, which ultimately saved lives, would not have been available because they would have been occupied by someone who could have been discharged,” Zucker said. “We made the right public health decision then and, given the same facts, we would make the same decisions again.”

The Covid-19 patients who returned to the nursing homes were likely not contagious according to the CDC’s guidelines at the time and were separated from other residents. Zucker added that state law requires nursing homes to refuse residents if they are unable to properly care for them.

“We simply said that you cannot refuse admission because of the Covid status,” he said. “We never said you had to accept, we said you couldn’t deny.”

The state’s top health official comes as the Cuomo government faces bipartisan criticism of the treatment of Covid-19 deaths in the nursing home. An investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James published in late January found that the New York Department of Health signed up to 50% of deaths from Covid-19 in nursing homes.

On Friday, Cuomo and Zucker said most of the spread of the virus was not due to the Covid-positive resident, but from the staff who look after them.

“Covid came from the staff in the nursing homes. They got it at home, they got it at the supermarket, they went to work and they brought Covid with them,” Cuomo said.

However, Cuomo has aggressively defended the state’s census, stating that these deaths were counted as part of hospital deaths rather than nursing homes. The Democratic governor has apologized for “creating a void” by not providing enough information quickly enough and by not fighting against misinformation.

“Twitter, false reports, will eventually become a reality,” said Cuomo. “Social media, 24-hour news network, if you don’t correct it, it’ll repeat … and then people will think it’s true.”

In August, prosecutors under the Trump administration requested information about the deaths in New York nursing homes that Cuomo has criticized as politically motivated. The state legislature also asked for similar information, but the Cuomo government postponed that request to focus on that of the Justice Department, the governor said.

One of Cuomo’s top advisors, Melissa DeRosa, reportedly told Democratic lawmakers that the governor’s administration was “frozen” at their request because they feared the data would be used against them by the Justice Department, Associated Press reported.

DeRosa has since tried to clarify her comments, stating in a statement last week that she was trying to tell lawmakers that they need to focus on the Justice Department’s request first.

“We were comprehensive and transparent in our responses to the DOJ and had to immediately focus our resources on the introduction of the second wave and the vaccine,” DeRosa said in the statement. “As I said when I called the legislature, we weren’t able to respond to your request as quickly as anyone would have liked.”

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Politics

How the US Misplaced to Hackers

How the United States Lost to Hackers

There’s a reason we believed in the fallacy that a crime could protect us: the crime was a bloody masterpiece.

Starting in 2007, the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear power plant, which destroyed around a fifth of Iranian centrifuges. Known as Stuxnet, this attack spread through seven holes in Microsoft and Siemens industrial software known as “zero days”. (Only one was previously announced but never patched). In the short term, Stuxnet was a complete success. It set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions years ago and stopped the Israelis from bombing Natanz and starting World War III. In the long term, it showed allies and opponents what they lacked and changed the digital world order.

In the next ten years an arms race was born.

NSA analysts left the agency to set up cyber weapons factories in Virginia like Vulnerability Research Labs, which sold click-and-shoot tools to American agencies and our closest English-speaking allies at Five Eyes. A contractor, Immunity Inc., founded by a former NSA analyst, started a more slippery slope. First, staff say, trained immunity advisors like Booz Allen, then defense company Raytheon, then the Dutch and Norwegian governments. But soon the Turkish army knocked.

Companies like CyberPoint took it a step further, stationing themselves overseas and sharing the tools and crafts that the UAE would eventually use to turn on its own people. In Europe, Pentagon spyware suppliers like the Hacking Team began selling the same tools to Russia and then Sudan that they were ruthlessly using.

As the market expanded beyond the NSA’s direct control, the agency continued to focus on crime. The NSA knew that the same vulnerabilities it found and exploited elsewhere would one day strike back Americans. The answer to this dilemma was to reduce the American state of emergency to an acronym – NOBUS – which stands for “Nobody But Us”. When the agency found a vulnerability that it believed could only be exploited, it hoarded it.

That strategy was part of what General Paul Nakasone, the current NSA director, and George Washington and Chinese strategist Sun Tzu before him, refer to as “active defense.”

In modern warfare, “active defense” means hacking enemy networks. It is a mutually assured destruction for the digital age: We hacked into the Russian troll networks and their grids as a sign of violence. Iran’s nuclear facilities to take out its centrifuges; and Huawei’s source code to penetrate its customers in Iran, Syria and North Korea for espionage and to set up an early warning system for the NSA to theoretically fend off attacks before they hit.

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Health

States within the US are Pulling Again Vaccine Doses from Federal Program for Nursing Houses

States in the US are Pulling Back Vaccine Doses from Federal Program for Nursing Homes

It wasn’t long before Keith Reed, an assistant health commissioner in Oklahoma, discovered a major logistical problem with the introduction of state vaccination. Week after week, Oklahoma allocated thousands of valuable doses to a federal program for nursing home patients who did not all use them. Indeed, Tens of thousands of cans sat untouched in freezers.

So his department rang an acoustic signal. It was decided to stop allocating vaccines from Oklahoma to the federal program, a partnership with private pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens to immunize residents of long-term care facilities. Instead, they would go to distribution channels that would get them into people’s arms faster.

A number of states have taken similar steps to divert care from the federal effort known as the Pharmacy Partnership for Long-Term Care Program. This is a vivid example of how chaotic the US vaccination effort has been. Some of the other states are Minnesota, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio.

Reed said moving to Oklahoma would do no harm: Walgreens and CVS have assured him that all nursing home residents in the state who needed and wanted to be vaccinated would have the first of their two shots by the end of the week.

The federal program used a formula that made it clear how many shots would be required for long-term care facilities like nursing homes, whose residents are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. Another problem has arisen: a significant number of residents, and particularly workers in the facilities, are reluctant to be vaccinated.

A study published Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 77.8 percent of residents and 37.5 percent of workers received the vaccine in an average long-term care facility in the first month of the program. The study says the real rate may be higher for workers as some may have been vaccinated in different settings. Even so, federal officials are particularly concerned about how many workers oppose vaccination and have stepped up efforts to change their minds.

Mr Reed said the doses Oklahoma took away from the federal program will go to thousands of Oklahomans who are 65 years or older and do not live in nursing homes.

“Our goal is to get the vaccine into someone else’s arms within seven days of receiving it from the freezer,” Reed said in an interview last week. “We just had a tough time with this amount of vaccines that were earmarked for this program when we could use this vaccine to go straight to Oklahomans.”

Nursing home residents’ advocates are watching closely for signs that the moves will hamper their vaccinations.

“If we find older adults are not getting the vaccines they need, that’s our business,” said Lisa Sanders, a spokeswoman for LeadingAge, which represents more than 5,000 nonprofit aging service providers.

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Business

White Home says states cannot buy Covid vaccine instantly

White House says states can't purchase Covid vaccine directly

Ron Klain, former White House Ebola Response Coordinator, speaks during a hearing for the House Subcommittee on Homeland Security in Washington, DC, the United States, on Tuesday, March 10, 2020.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said Sunday that US states are unable to purchase Covid-19 vaccines directly from manufacturers, as some are trying to do under emergency use approval issued by the Food and Drug Administration to have.

“This vaccine is subject to emergency approval for legal reasons,” Klain told NBC’s Meet the Press when asked about the inquiries. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

The comments come after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday asked Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla to allow the state to buy vaccines directly from the company, citing the scarcity of supplies.

Pfizer told Cuomo that it would not be able to do so under the terms of his December emergency clearance.

The company said it was open to the idea, but “before we could sell directly to state governments, HHS would need to approve this proposal based on the EUA granted to Pfizer by the FDA.”

The Department of Health and Human Services – still under Republican leadership at the time – accused Democrat Cuomo of trying “to get to the top of the line at the expense of other jurisdictions”.

Klain said he believed governors were “understandably frustrated” with the slow pace of vaccinations to date.

The number of vaccines administered falls far short of projections made under President Donald Trump, although the pace has picked up in recent weeks. President Joe Biden has pledged the US will administer 100 million doses of vaccine in his first 100 days in office.

“We’re going to ramp up production. We’re going to ramp up sales. We’re going to work closely with the governors. We’re going to get this vaccine out to the American people,” Klain said.

The Biden government has urged the federal government to strengthen its role in the manufacture and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.

TJ Ducklo, a White House spokesman, previously opposed state efforts to buy vaccines direct, saying, “We need to take a national approach to vaccination and make sure states don’t compete against each other as they do with PPE, ventilators and others. ” Testing. “

Ducklo didn’t immediately respond to an email on Sunday. The Department of Health and Human Services also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Before Biden took office, other states had asked Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services to allow them to buy vaccines directly from the manufacturer.

The governors of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin – all Democrats – sent a letter on Jan. 15 accusing the Trump administration of botching the introduction of the first vaccine.

“If you cannot or do not want to give us this shipment, we urge you to give us permission to buy vaccines directly so we can distribute them,” wrote the governors.

At least one of those states appears to have been tracking the plan since Biden was inaugurated on Wednesday.

Bobby Leddy, a spokesperson for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, said in a statement to CBS: “We are confident that President Joe Biden will have a clear national strategy, based on data and science, to help our nation overcome this To help health crisis. ” “”

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Tesla’s U.S. Gross sales Slowed in 22 States in 2020

Tesla’s U.S. Sales Slowed in 22 States in 2020

After several years of rapid growth, Tesla US sales appear to have slowed in 2020, in part due to the coronavirus pandemic. This is evident from new data on new vehicle registrations.

In 22 states, which account for around 65 percent of the new car market, 130,844 new Teslas were registered last year, an increase of less than 2 percent compared to 2019, according to the market research company Cross-Sell.

The pandemic dampened sales of all automakers in the spring and summer, forcing companies to suspend most production stops in North America. Tesla’s Fremont, California facility was shut down from late March to mid-May. Last year was also the first full year that Tesla vehicle purchases no longer qualified for a federal tax credit.

The company’s sluggish sales in its 22 states, which include California, Florida, New York, and Texas, came in spite of the addition of the fourth car to Tesla’s lineup, the Model Y, which appears to be selling its top seller, the Model 3.

Model 3 registrations across the state’s 22 cross-sell routes fell 35 percent last year to 67,638 from 103,810 vehicles in 2019. Sales of the Model Y began earlier this year and exceeded those of the Model 3 in August.

“Model Y is doing very well and is really competitive with Model 3,” said Meagan Saxon, director of partnerships at Cross-Sell.

In the last three months of 2020, 22,267 Model Ys were registered in the 22 states. At the same time, Model 3 sales were just 14,823 vehicles, a decrease of almost a third from Q4 2019. Model Y is a more spacious hatchback version of the Model 3 sedan.

Cross-sell provides a rare glimpse into Tesla’s U.S. registrations as the automaker doesn’t breakdown sales by region or country. The company recently reported that its global deliveries rose 36 percent to 499,550 cars in 2020. That increase was mainly due to rapid growth in China, where a new Tesla plant started production of the Model 3 a year ago. Tesla is also growing in Europe, despite increasing competition from new electric cars introduced by Volkswagen, Volvo, and others.

Tesla is expected to announce its fourth quarter financial performance on Wednesday.

Cross-Sell buys vehicle registration data from 22 states that they put for sale. California, where Tesla is based and where many people are much more willing to buy electric cars than other Americans, accounts for about 35 percent of the company’s US sales.

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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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Feds Order States to Increase Vaccine Targets as Covid-19 Deaths Surge

Feds Order States to Expand Vaccine Targets as Covid-19 Deaths Surge

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month recommended that states vaccinate, after vaccinating health workers and residents of long-term care facilities, people over 75 and certain “frontline workers” who cannot do their jobs from home should. Only then, the CDC advised, should states turn to people ages 65 to 74 and adults of all ages with high-risk diseases. The CDC recommendations were not binding, but many states have largely followed them while demand far outstrips supply.

How Mr Azar’s enforcement threat will work is unclear. In two weeks, Mr. Biden will have been sworn in as President. Mr Azar said the upcoming Biden administration will be informed of the changes, although he added that Americans “are working with a government at a time and this is the approach we believe will best serve the mission.”

Mr Biden is expected to release details of his own vaccination schedule this week, which will include federal government-sponsored mass vaccination clinics. The Biden transition team declined to comment on the new Trump policy on Tuesday. However, a person familiar with the president-elect’s plans said Mr Biden also had plans to expand the universe of those eligible for vaccination.

Mr Azar said that people searching for gunfire because they are at high risk of disease are required to provide “some form of medical documentation as defined by the governors,” but he did not elaborate. A significant portion of the population suffers from conditions that the CDC has determined to increase the risk of serious Covid disease, starting with obesity, which affects at least 40 percent of adults.

Other people who would qualify for vaccines immediately under Mr Azar’s policy are more than 30 million adults with heart disease, 37 million with chronic kidney disease and 1 in 10 with diabetes.

The new distribution plan, first announced by Axios Tuesday morning, is a reversal for the Trump administration, which had withheld about half of its vaccine supplies – millions of vials – to ensure second doses were available. Mr Azar said the administration always expected to make the move if they were convinced of the supply chain.

Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Advisory Board, praised the government’s decision and compared the current situation to the Titanic, where there weren’t enough lifeboats to save everyone. “And you have to decide who you want to pass on. “